Ashley Shuyler

Ashley Shuyler Carter is the founder of AfricAid, a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education in Africa in order to provide young women with the opportunity to transform their own lives and the futures of their communities. Since its inception in 2001, AfricAid has supported thousands of Tanzanian students in their educational and professional goals.

Shuyler was born in 1985 and grew up in Houston, Texas and Golden, Colorado. Her parents are Nina and Richard Shuyler, and she is married to Phil Carter.

Education

During a trip to Tanzania in 1996, Shuyler learned that only a small fraction of girls in Tanzania are able to obtain an education beyond the primary school level. In response to that experience, she founded AfricAid. As a student at Colorado Academy in Denver at the time, Shuyler came to believe that education is the most crucial component of any long-term solution to the challenges facing Africa, particularly in the areas of poverty, health and inequality. After high school, Shuyler attended Harvard University, where she continued to explore issues of international development in the third world. During her time there, she conducted research in several Maasai communities and served as a teacher in rural regions of Tanzania, India, and China. Shuyler's thesis at Harvard provided an assessment of Tanzania’s system of national examinations. She graduated from Harvard in 2008 and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at that time. In 2011, Shuyler joined the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

AfricAid

Shuyler served the Executive Director of AfricAid until 2011, and is currently a member of its Board of Directors. During her time as Executive Director, she returned to Tanzania for several months every year to work with AfricAid's partners and build its programs. In 2010, Shuyler launched the Kisa Project, a new AfricAid initiative that supports girls' scholarships and leadership training in Africa. While in the U.S., Shuyler has worked to grow AfricAid's reach through events, presentations, and film screenings of Somebody Like Me, a documentary film she produced about life in a rural Maasai village. In 2007, KidHaven Press published a biography about Shuyler by Rachel Lynette for its Young Heroes series.

Awards

External links

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