Zia Akhter Abbas

As an Executive Vice President at The Citizens Foundation, Zia leads TCF’s growing partnership with the Government as well as its global resource mobilization effort across 14 countries. He helped steer the process of developing TCF’s new organizational strategy to create 2 million agents of positive change by 2030. Under his stewardship, TCF has rapidly expanded its public-private partnerships by adopting 300+ government schools educating more than 43,000 students. Zia also serves as Board Trustee with the Global Schools Forum - an organization aiming to strengthen the education sector by working with non-state organizations serving children from low-income backgrounds in developing countries. Before joining TCF in 2014, Zia spent 17 years at leading global financial services organizations including Citibank and Standard Chartered and served on the Board of Directors for the leading payments switch in Pakistan. TCF is a nonprofit set up in 1995 by a group of citizens who wanted to drive positive social change through education. Today, TCF is one of the world’s leading organizations in the field of formal education for the less privileged, educating 266,000+ children through 1,650+ formal school units located across Pakistan.