Shafiq Khan was remarkable digital leader at Marriott International. First as the Senior Vice President of eCommerce and then as the Senior Vice President of Channel Strategy and Distribution, he helped grow the company's digital sales from $150 million to $15 billion. Under Khan's watch, the company became one of the top-ten companies in digital sales in the United States.
A native of Pakistan, Khan would return frequently, and the state of the country's education system for the poorest members of society were stark. Khan began to connect the dots between the work he did at Marriott and a way to help solve global literacy. Teach the World Foundation was born.
The company has developed digital tools to help teach those children who cannot afford basic education Pakistan, and the program has expended to Bangladesh, as well. Later this year, Malawi will be added as the third country. Khan makes the point that global literacy is not only a worthy undertaking to help the most vulnerable of the world's citizens, but it should also have much broader economic and societal benefits. He describes his journey herein.
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Peter High: You are the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Teach the World Foundation. Could you describe the foundation and its mission?
Shafiq Khan: In a macro sense, our vision is to enhance human potential by furthering knowledge and learning, specifically by increasing literacy. Two out of seven people worldwide are not functionally literate, which is a huge cost for the world. To help minimize this issue, we decided to use our digital background to make a social impact on the world by enhancing human potential. Digital technology has clearly made a massive impact on every domain, and our world has changed as a result. However, this change has not translated effectively into the education space. Because education is a non-profit and non-competitive space, we have not seen digital technology leveraged there. Our mission is to establish and deploy models of literacy and learning effectively and with scale through the power of digital technology. We want to prove that we have a new way of learning that will address two massive issues that the world has.
- The first issue is the broad problem with literacy in general. As I mentioned, two of seven people are illiterate, which results in them being more of a drag on the world than a contributor.
- The second issue is more of an opportunity. We have the ability to leverage digital technology to improve learning, but we are not doing that so far. Fortunately, we now have the opportunity to do so.
We have a phenomenal set of stories regarding leveraging digital for learning. With regard to Teach the World, the story is about leveraging digital to create a revolution in literacy, and in the nirvana scenario, to completely eliminate the illiteracy problem. While it may take a few decades, we believe this is the path forward, which represents a significant revolution for the world.
An even larger story is believing that digital will enable learning in a way that previously was not possible, and that this model has moved us into a new paradigm. The current paradigm is a push paradigm where teachers push content and knowledge towards us. On the flip side, digital enables self-learning and learning by doing. The moment you start to move to that paradigm, learning improves dramatically. In our case, we have found that with self-learning, with far less time, our children are learning more than they would through the push medium.
It is critical to believe that all human progress is a function of learning, which we have seen throughout history. If learning is enhanced even by one percent, learning in the world would eventually double what it would have been otherwise. If we had improved learning by one percent 1,000 years ago, we would have [the progress we now have] in 2018 200 years ago. The big story is that this self-learning paradigm is going to be enabled by digital tools, and it simply could not have happened before because analog practices could not have handled it.
High: You had a long and illustrious career in the private sector with global businesses, such as United Airlines, US Airways, and Marriott, where you were the Senior Vice President of E-Commerce as well as the SVP of Channel Strategy and Distribution. At Marriott, you helped grow a $150 million digital footprint into a $15 billion digital e-commerce operation within the larger business. As you looked to pivot from the private sector, how did the idea occur to you?
Khan: I started with digital accidentally because I was given a problem to solve. The solution to this problem happened to be online booking, which is all powered by digital and electronic ticketing. Because of this, I became a digital pioneer, which led me to become a digital student as well. As a digital student, you are looking at what is playing out in the space around you, what you are doing, and how you are doing relative to other industries. We did quite well in this regard as 30 to 35 percent of all internet sales are in travel, which makes it the largest sector on the internet. Once you realize that digital is having implications for travel, banking, and retailing, you start to wonder where digital might have its next or biggest manifestation. It did not take long to realize that the biggest manifestation of digital could be in enhancing learning.
To some degree, this idea occurred serendipitously. I come from Pakistan, which is a poor country where many people are illiterate. Previously, we started a foundation in Pakistan that picked children off the streets and took them to school. We now have roughly 115 children that we are effectively educating. However, throughout this process, we have been introduced to the scale of the problem. While it is gratifying to be changing the lives of 115 children, there are two billion people that need this. This is extremely evident in Pakistan where there are 20.5 million illiterate individuals. I started to look at this as a problem that we needed to solve. I ran into my partner, Imran Sayeed, who is a professor at MIT Sloan, and he was likewise looking at the impact of digital education. Imran’s focus was in the US, and my focus was more in Pakistan. That said, we started brainstorming roughly seven years ago, and we landed on the concept that we currently have approximately two years later. We believed that this idea could provide a solution to the illiteracy problem in developing countries. Once we landed on the concept, we told our respective employers that we would be leaving at a certain point in time. In my case, I announced my departure three years prior to leaving Marriott. Because Marriott is such an incredible company, they were fully supportive of my move. To sum it all up, the basic genesis was that I had a digital background, and I was looking for something that would make a sizeable social impact, which happened to be in education.
High: While you are still in the early days, you have had the chance to explore this far enough to see what is working and develop some exciting strategies. Could you talk about the methods that you have used?
Khan: The first question we had to ask was, what is the model? This involves defining the problem, which in our case is the illiteracy issue around the world, specifically around the shortage of teachers. There are many places that simply do not have the number of teachers necessary. For example, we work in the Himalayas, which is 10,000 feet up, and there is no electricity, no internet connection, and few working roads. Because of this, anybody who is educated simply leaves, so there are no teachers as a result. There are still children living there, and they are not going to school.
Once we recognized the problem, we had to determine how to teach a child without a teacher, which is where the power of digital came into play. While there are online curricula deployed around the world and MOOCs that are huge, these are primarily focused on higher education. That said, we recognized that this online education could be brought down to the K-5 level. The ways in which we would deliver that became our next question. Tablets came around in 2011, and all of a sudden, the smallest children around the world were able to negotiate their way into getting their favorite one. Because of this, we decided to have an online curriculum taught on a tablet. The final decision was determining how to motivate children to study without a teacher, which is where the concept of a gamified curriculum came in. At the K-5 level, it is possible to turn everything into a game. Because of this, children can learn their basic spelling and arithmetic through a game. We combined these three elements to deliver an online curriculum, which was delivered on tablets in a gamified format.
The next step for us was proving this plan to ourselves. We developed a long-term plan, which consisted of three simple steps.
- We wanted to prove the concept to ourselves, so we decided to deploy a proof-of-concept model. This entailed finding the right type of setting, and from there, seeing what impact it had. Looking at the results would tell us if our model worked or not.
- If we succeeded in phase one, it would not completely prove our idea because it was exclusively in one location. Because of this, our second phase was proving that our idea could scale significantly. Specifically, our target was to have at least fifty replications of what we were doing in this phase.
- While we were doing the second phase, we invited the World Bank, USAID, and governments of various countries to be viewers of our work, rather than funders. From there, if they saw success, we hoped they would take us to the third phase, which was global expansion. The global expansion would entail the World Bank writing a check to Sierra Leone specifying that a certain part of the funding needed to go into illiteracy and this new model. Currently, we are working on this part of the plan.
In terms of other aspects of the model, we decided that we were going to focus on children. To achieve this, we decided to take the line of least resistance in terms of deployment, which means we would try to deploy our model in school-like settings as fast as possible. Unfortunately, even in the poorest of countries, the vast majority of schools are used for a single shift. However, in our model, we try to maximize the existing infrastructure to the best of our ability. We are currently running six pilots in six different geographies, and by the end of the year, we will be impacting roughly 1,200 children.
High: Can you talk about some of the results?
Khan: The results are interesting. A key part of what we are doing is measurement because if you do not measure the results, you do not know if it works. Specifically, this had to be a third-party measurement because we could not be evaluating ourselves as we were too vested in the belief that this concept works. Because of this, we hired Nielsen, and they were our third-party independent measurement and research mechanism. Nielsen established a control group, and we had our own intervention team that we taught digitally. One of the questions they asked me was, "What does success look like?" In response, I said, "My group is going to be taught using only tablets without any instruction. The other group is going to be taught in a regular classroom with a regular teacher, who is there to assist them." Given that, I would be happy if my kids scored half as well, so that was our success metric.
The results were astoundingly good, and in fact, our kids did two to two and a half times better than the group getting the traditional education, which we were extremely pleased with. Subsequently, we now have six pilots, and we have results from three of them already. All three pilots are in different geographies as we have conducted them in Karachi, which is where the original concept was, at the foothill of the Himalayas, and in a refugee camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh. While these geographies and settings could not be more different, the results have been nearly identical. In each case, the results were two to three times better than the control group we measured against. At this point, everything that we have, such as the hardware, software, and our own approaches, are in the early stages. The results are currently extremely strong, and five years from now, when we can personalize the curriculum with hardware specially designed for education and games that are localized and personalized, the results will be even better.
High: So many startups often have to pivot in their early stages because they are met with the reality of the marketplace, which suggests that something is off. It is exciting that your idea has surpassed the metrics you put out to define success. You are proving the model, especially when you take into consideration the diversity of geographies and the different people that are involved. Am I correct in assuming that these are not intellectually-gifted children regarding their ability to learn?
Khan: You are absolutely right as these are kids off the street. These children come from a community that has school, but they could not afford the two and a half dollars that it required to attend. Because of this, we picked them off the streets, and we got incredible results. In fact, we found that at least one of the kids that we picked up happened to be a genius.
Another aspect about digital is that you can serve the needs of the entire class. In a typical classroom, eighty percent of the kids are in the middle, ten are slow, and ten are much further ahead than the rest of the class. On both ends of the spectrum, there is a major issue. The smart kids get bored and make trouble, and the slow kids struggle to keep up and generally continue to fall further and further behind as the class moves on. In my entire experience with digital, I have found that everything we estimated was beaten by a factor of four to five. Specifically, adoption and the adjacencies were significantly greater.
When we were launching online booking for the airlines, I was not thinking about electronic boarding passes, which are lifesavers for many people. Furthermore, I was not thinking about running the entire loyalty program digitally. It has become clear that everywhere you go, the benefits of digital often outweigh the original plan. I have become a believer that there will always be numerous additional benefits that come with the core one. In our case, while our original intent was to primarily make sure that we could teach children who did not have access to teachers, we found that children being taught by poor teachers in the developed world are learning much more with digital as well. All of a sudden, there is a massive democratization of education happening where kids in poor schools with poor teachers are now at parity with kids in rich schools where the teaching staff is significantly more qualified. Additionally, we took the children’s amount of screen time into account. While there is no evidence that three to four hours of screen time for children is bad, we limited our class time in the school day to two and a half hours. Because of this, our results involve kids with two and a half hours per day outperforming kids who had four and a half hour days. Lastly, I am seeing that children who are self-learning have a level of confidence that is different than that of a kid being educated in the traditional way. While this is not objectively measurable, teachers are telling us that this is one of the more dramatic changes they are seeing.
High: As you discuss the gains in confidence that these children are showing, it highlights the downstream effects of a good education on the functionally illiterate, such as the potential for economic gains, the reduction in crime, and the lifting of more children and families out of poverty. Could you elaborate on the progress you hope to see in this regard?
Khan: The correlation between education and economics is nearly perfect. Our belief is that if we are going to educate millions to become functionally literate, the entire world will benefit. The individuals benefit because they gain new skills, such as the ability to operate a computer, read the newspaper, and understand a lease and mortgage. These skills would allow them to earn jobs in an increasingly global world where work is shifting to wherever people can do the job. If you have a more literate workforce that can get the job done in the right manner, work is going to shift to that location. Once the work shifts, the country will benefit economically in a significant way.
High: You have mentioned the countries that you are involved in, such as Bangladesh, Malawi, and your native Pakistan. How have you chosen these three, and which countries are you considering in the future?
Khan: Pakistan was an easy choice because I am originally from the country, and it was easy for us to get started there knowing the need, the place, and having the network and connections necessary. The need was extremely high because of the extensive illiterate population, yet there is a massive amount of work being done to address the problem in the country. Earlier this year, The Economist, conducted a report on Pakistan's education, and they published an article that said, "Pakistan is home to the most frenetic education reform in the world," which says it all.
Bangladesh became a choice largely because we were forced by an NGO, who we are extremely fond of, that is operating in a large collection of refugee camps in Bangladesh. In these camps, there are roughly 100,000 illiterate children who presented a tremendous opportunity for us to test our ability to scale. Because phase two was the scaling phase, they were the perfect place for us to go to.
With Malawi, we were always interested in Sub-Saharan Africa because it is among the poorest regions in the world. We decided to ask our friends at the World Bank which countries they would recommend. By and large, because we are all English-speaking, we were limited to Anglophone countries. They created a short list for us, which included Malawi. Part of the reason we decided to go to Malawi was that it was the poorest country on that list, which included names such as Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ghana. With the help of the World Bank, we picked Malawi, we found a strong NGO partner, and we are hoping to start a project there later this year.
High: Do you have a sense for how quickly you would prefer to go to other countries? Is your intent to roll out in a comparable pace, or do you want to linger on the ones you are currently focused on to have a chance to see the pilots mature?
Khan: At this point, the plans are to get adoption by organizations such as the World Bank and USAID. As soon as they are able to commit money to our programs, we want to go global. We do not see that happening for the next 18 to 24 months because we need to prove that we can scale effectively over at least one academic cycle, which we are currently in the process of doing. We want to move as quickly as we can, and the idea is to be successful, but we have to be deliberate in the strength of the execution that we expect to see, what we pick, where we go, and what the strength of the partner is.
We have more demand than we can handle today, but we hope to prove that we can scale. Specifically, we hope to be able to build a much larger cadre of implementers with us and with our partners. If we are able to do that successfully, we will hopefully be going global wherever there is a need. While the beginning is most likely going to be in anglophone countries, we hope to have partners in other parts of the world who can work with us and take our model. We have no proprietary feelings about our model, and in fact, nirvana for us would be that this model becomes accepted, picked up, and implemented by others successfully.
High: How would you suggest that others who wish to contribute get involved?
Khan: Whenever you have a revolutionary movement happening, you need premier leadership at various levels. A good way to help is to begin to understand the current digital revolution in learning and become a believer, which is what we have seen throughout the transformation. We need the Jack Welch’s of the world saying, "I want to spend ten percent of my time on digital." From there, we need to determine where the application is. Regarding the application of learning, it applies to the basic workforce and how educated it is going to be. Additionally, it applies to companies’ own training. After you become a believer, you can begin to look at how you would tactically support this.
You can support the Teach the World Foundation by connecting us to people and by contributing to us. Obviously, we always happily accept contributions, and we have a volunteer force that helps us with all types of activities, such as search engine optimization and fundraising. Strategically, I would highly recommend global businesses make global education and literacy one of their top corporate responsibility priorities. If organizations make this one of their top two or three CSR priorities, that alone will be a major support to this revolution.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
