Director
Hla Hla is on a mission to make quality education affordable by empowering local professionals and leveraging technology. She has been incubating a school idea with other graduate students from Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Business school. After completion of Master’s degree in Public Administration program at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, she plans to launch first high school by 2017 in Mandalay with a goal of opening network of schools across the nation in coming years. Hla Hla is dedicated to increasing access to quality education in Myanmar.
Hla Hla was an elementary school teacher at ILBC. Pre-Collegiate Program helped her won full tuition scholarship to study at William Penn University where she majored K-12 Education with 3 endorsements in ESL, Reading and Special Education. Upon her return, she worked for Myanmar Egress a local non-profit NGO where she headed English department and created graduate scholarship program for 120 Myanmar students. She believes in nurturing democracy through renovations of intelligent and motivated citizens. Hla Hla is passionate about education policy reform to foster new educational system and culture that supports the development of knowledge, skills, and values of the citizenry that are vital to a vibrant and prosperous democratic society.
Hla Hla has eight years’ teaching experience with UN Organizations, INGOs, government ministries, civil society organizations, business executives, and college students. She also coordinated teacher trainings, curriculum developments for citizenship education, liberal arts studies program, and scholarship programs for study abroad. As an educational consultant to international institutions Hla Hla has in-depth knowledge and understanding of current Myanmar educational context and market opportunities.
Currently Hla Hla serves on a board of directors of Paññā Institute (non profit NGO) and oversees the quality as well as planning and evaluation of academic programs.
At HKS, Hla Hla has focused her studies on Institutions and Development, Policies for Competitiveness, Politics and Policies, Markets and Market Failures, Social Innovation, Social Entrepreneurship, Strategic Organizational Management for Non-Government Organizations, and other leadership skills for public leadership and social entrepreneurship.