Shireen Yacoub

Education and Development Expert

Summary

Shireen Yacoub is a seasoned executive with more than 16 years of experience in the field of education technology, skilling, and youth empowerment. She is currently a Managing Partner at Istidama Consulting where she leads strategic planning and partnerships for the company, which offers socio-economic development consulting services and research.

Career History

Shireen was previously the CEO of Edraak and part of its founding team. Launched by the Queen Rania Foundation in 2014, Edraak is the Arab world's leading open online learning platform serving more than six million learners in the MENA region.

Through her work and leadership at Edraak, Shireen led critical projects that helped reshape the e-learning landscape within the higher education and lifelong learning space in the MENA region, leveraging education technology and enriching high quality online educational content in Arabic. She has also led the organization’s strategic partnerships with key stakeholders such as Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, the World Bank, the Jack Ma Foundation, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation, and leading universities in the MENA region.

Shireen serves as an advisor on multiple councils in the higher education space focused on e-learning and skilling such as the United Nation’s SDG Academy. She also served as an advisor on "The Skills Consortium"of the World Economic Forum (WEF) between 2020 and 2022. Her research is focused on the intersection of education technology and the future of work.

Shireen is an Academic Advisor at The SDG Academy of The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and was a Council Member at the E-Learning Center of Al Hussein Technical University (HTU).

She is a volunteer with various NGOs working in the space of local community development, youth and women empowerment. Her thought leadership pieces have been published on various reputable global platforms such as the World Economic Forum Agenda, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, the World Bank Blog and others.

Education, Certification and Board Membership

MA Technology, Innovation and Education | Harvard University | Boston, USA

BA Human Resources and International Management l Manhattanville College I New York, USA

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