Serving Students in Conflict Zones
Aishwarya Shetty, GED’23
hen Aishwarya Shetty, a graduate of Penn GSE’s International Educational Development Program (IEDP) who delivers education to crisis zones, thinks about why her work matters, she returns to a moment in a camp for Afghan asylum seekers in Qatar. A teenage boy had a gun tattooed on his arm. She asked him about it. “I want to have the real one,” he told her. Why? “So no one can do anything to me.” The exchange crystallized a conviction she carries into every project: “No amount of literacy or numeracy outcomes matters if we aren’t using education as a tool to build a moral compass.”
Shetty also led a project-based learning initiative in India, reaching more than five million learners, and is piloting “Digi Wise” in Peru to strengthen critical thinking in the age of AI and social media. “What is common through all of it is to meet learners where they are, with what they actually need,” she said.
Her pragmatism is paired with a fierce ethic of collaboration. “Do not reinvent the wheel,” Shetty said. “If something already exists, adapt, partner, collaborate.” She pushes to co-develop with local partners, keep materials open source, prioritize low- or no-tech delivery, and run content through child counselors and psychiatrists. “The tension we navigate most often is speed versus quality,” she said. “In a crisis, you cannot wait a year to complete a needs assessment; children are out of school now. So, we’ve learned to do rapid consultations at the onset of a crisis, with ministries, local NGOs, parents, teachers, community ambassadors, all compressed into days rather than months.”
Last year, Shetty left EAA for two new roles. At Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies, she is supporting the network’s redesign so people with lived experience shape agendas. And at Teach for Afghanistan, she serves as senior advisor, supporting fundraising, learning quality, storytelling, and sustainability, while making sure the credit and control stay where they belong. “Afghans lead this work,” she said. “I am there to support and advocate.”
The roots of her approach stretch back to Penn GSE. She arrived on campus after a computer science degree, a Teach For India fellowship, and early work in edtech and at EAA. She needed “credibility and rigor” and found both. “Every single course helped me learn and, more importantly, unlearn,” she said. And though she applies the skills she learned in the classroom to the ongoing, real-world contexts of her work, one of the program’s other lasting assets has been the IEDP network. “My coursemates are my community, who have had my back at Penn and life after,” she said. “We show up for each other, sharing opportunities, debating ideas, and pushing each other to be better educators and leaders in our field. And my professors are still available to talk through my career decisions and guide me. . . . In a world that moves as fast as ours does, that feels like an anchor.”
But Shetty is clear-eyed about the challenges in her field. There’s no room for a “savior complex;” communities are not waiting to be rescued. Her measure of success is whether programs can outlast outside funding. “The most important thing you can do in this sector is make yourself redundant,” she said. “If you have done your job well, the community no longer needs you.” The collaborations that work, she’s found, share this aligned vision, a real appetite for risk, and the flexibility to change course when evidence demands it.
On the hard days, she reminds herself of stark figure: “Over 520 million children, more than one in five of the world’s children, are currently living in conflict zones. And that number has nearly doubled since the 1990s. . . . On the days when the bureaucracy is exhausting, or the politics of aid feel impossible, I come back to that number: one in five. And I get back to [work].”
Read an extended Q&A with Shetty: penng.se/shetty