Photo by Lexy Swall

Shafiq Khan (MBA 1982) loves to solve problems. It’s what attracted him to the case study method at HBS and, after graduation, to consulting at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. Then, at United Airlines, Khan encountered another challenge: The company was spending one-sixth of its revenues on getting tickets into the hands of its customers. His solution—electronic ticketing and online self-booking—came through the transformative power of digital technology. “Before long you start to think, What about worldwide impact? What about social impact? Khan says.

That reflection is what led him to the greatest problem he has tackled in his career: global illiteracy. According to Khan, two out of every seven people in the world are unable to read or write. “That has devastating consequences for individuals, nations, and the world,” he observes. Addressing illiteracy is among the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

So, after more than three decades in the travel industry, Khan turned his digital know-how to education with the launch, in 2016, of the nonprofit Teach the World Foundation. “All human progress is a function of learning,” Khan explains. “Digital will do for learning what the internal combustion engine did for transportation—propel it to new heights that were unimaginable earlier.”

Khan and cofounder Imran Sayeed, an entrepreneur and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School, started their work in Pakistan, where both men were born. Despite an initial resistance to digital learning in the United States, they believed Pakistan—with 23 million of its school-age children not in classes and a chronic shortage of teachers—would embrace the new educational approach and that the poorest communities might reap the largest benefits.

Teach the World, funded primarily by its founders and their friends and families, uses tablets and educational games to teach math, English, and local languages at schools. The organization also sets up micro schools—one-room digital schoolhouses in communities that lack the requisite infrastructure, such as refugee camps and urban slums. The organization also is piloting a smartphone-based homeschooling program, with the goal of addressing family illiteracy.

What these programs have in common is their low cost. The in-school program, for instance, can cost under $100 per student, per year. And the organization’s approach has already shown high impact. Evaluation undertaken by Nielsen on behalf of Teach the World found that students enrolled in the digitalprogram perform twice as well in math and English as students in a control group who are learning through traditional means. The success was a shock even to Teach the World’s founders. “It was not just the 10 or 20 percent improvement, or even parity, that we were expecting,” says Sayeed. “Now it’s just a matter of scaling.”

Currently, Teach the World is working in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Malawi, with a total of more than 2,500 students. That in itself is success. Khan recounts a recent visit to a school in Pakistan. “These kids who are self-learning are just palpably, tangibly more confident,” he says. “They’re not just doing better in English and math and Urdu; they’re doing better in science, too.”

But a few thousand students isn’t enough, Khan says. “If you’re a five-year-old in Pakistan and you’re not in school, there’s a 50 percent chance that you’ll remain illiterate throughout your lifetime. If you are six years old and are still not in school, there is a 65 percent chance. And if you’re 10 years old and you’re not in school, there is a 95 percent chance that you’re going to be forever illiterate.”

While original expansion plans were curtailed by the pandemic, Teach the World now hopes to expand to 200,000 learners by 2026 and to 10 million by 2030. To do so will require partnerships with large foundations, companies, and governments, which Khan believes are within reach now that the organization has developed a proof of concept.

“Success will be eradicating illiteracy in 20 years,” observes Khan. “It’s a massive goal, but you’ve got to shoot for the summit of Everest; if you only get to base camp, it’s still a great accomplishment. We believe we have a real shot at eradicating illiteracy in our lifetime.”

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