Ahmed Syed
Ahmed Syed is a strategic partnerships and growth professional whose career has spanned startups, inclusive finance, and international development, drawn to the challenge of unlocking opportunity in under-resourced and emerging markets, taking him from the UK to Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and East Africa.
In 2018, Ahmed was selected as a Kiva Fellow in the South Pacific, promoting financial inclusion in some of the region's most remote communities.
At Onja, a non-profit backed by the Alan and Gill Grey Foundation that trains underprivileged youth in Madagascar for careers in technology, he has led enterprise growth, owning new strategic partnerships and account management, and managing the professionalism function that supports Onja's developers in the workplace. His work there demonstrates what cross-sector collaboration looks like in practice, applying commercial discipline to a development mission, and turning that into sustainable outcomes for young people excluded from traditional economic pathways.