Nariman Moustafa

Nariman Moustafa is a 2023 Echidna Global Scholar at Brookings. Her work focuses on creating an enabling environment for sexual and reproductive health education in community spaces and public schools, through multi-stakeholder partnerships and decolonial approaches.

She is an Egypt-based educator, researcher, and community organizer in the broader field of decolonial and social justice-based education. Formally, she holds a master’s degree in education from Harvard University. Additionally, her education was informed and influenced by a long lineage of non-institutional actors, including the Nile, the desert, her grandmother, and the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution. Her projects revolve around reclaiming diverse knowledge cosmologies using community art among other methods, assembling as a form of social participation for justice, and crafting critical digital education spaces.

Moustafa has more than 10 years of experience in the fields of international education, social innovation, higher-education teaching, community art, and participatory policy processes, as well as in agile and adaptive leadership practices. She has worked on projects that range from consulting for governments on how to improve education with limited resources to designing and facilitating socially transformative processes with women, youth, and refugees.

Globally, she works as a senior researcher at EdTech Hub, a global consortium of evidence-based EdTech research for education policymakers, and as a senior analyst at Open Development and Education where she focuses on creating a community of practice of African researchers to unlock data for Africa. In Egypt, she serves as a curriculum developer and advisor at Dawar for Arts on a project focused on regional sexual and reproductive health and rights, as well as the president of the Board of Trustees for the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS), a higher education liberal arts institute.

Previously, she founded several initiatives for reenvisioning justice-centered education, including Mesahat: Liberating Learning Spaces for children (translated to “free spaces” from Arabic) and Tagawor for adults (“collaborative neighborhood learning”). With a belief in local action and transnational solidarity, she is a steering member of the Ecoversities Alliance, a 500+ global alliance of institutions reimagining higher education from a decolonial perspective. She also serves as a teaching assistant for community organizing and adaptive leadership courses at the Harvard Kennedy School, in addition to being a post-growth fellow at the Post Growth Institute.