Narmin Ismail: Champion for women’s education – Winner 2016 Canadian Immigrant Award

City: Toronto, Ontario

Narmin Ismail wants to make the world a better place, and she wants to do it by empowering women. Deciding to start a non-profit foundation, the seasoned leader thought long and hard about the best empowerment model to use — she realized that education was the key. She launched the Spark of Hope Foundation in Toronto in 2014, with the goal of providing university-level educational scholarships to bright young women from the developing world.

“I’d like to provide the opportunity to help thousands of young women, from the developing world, especially areas of conflict and remote areas, achieve their dreams of getting a university education,” explains Ismail. “These young women will become tomorrow’s leaders, and will make a transformative impact in the world, as doctors, engineers, journalists, lawyers, managers, scientists, teachers and role models to the next generation of girls.”

The MBA thanks her parents for ensuring she had access to a quality education herself. “Access to good higher education was why my parents had moved to Canada from Kenya [when I was a teenager],” she says.

Sharing the gift of education with women outside Canada is now what drives her as Spark’s CEO. But starting a new foundation is challenging work, even for someone like Ismail, who has extensive entrepreneurial experience, and a mix of management and leadership skills in for-profit and non-profit sectors. Her original goal was to support seven students by September 2015, but she had no funds, students, university collaborations or charitable status.

Today, the foundation supports 36 students, has four alumnae, has Canadian charitable status, and has formal and informal university agreements. Students have come from countries like Liberia, Palestine and Syria to attend undergraduate and graduate programs at various institutions including Aga Khan University in Karachi, American University of Beirut, London School of Economics and University of Calgary.

The foundation hopes to be able to support 60 students by December 2016, and 1,400 between 2016 to 2025. Ismail says it is still a young foundation with challenges ahead, but she has these words of wisdom to guide her: “Dream big; take a small step today and every day toward your dream.”

Source: Narmin Ismail | Canadian Immigrant