The Akilah Institute is excited to announce that Lisa Lamprecht (Martilotta), Akilah’s regional director for Africa, will join the board of directors next year. She will leave her current role in January 2017 to focus on long-term strategy and scaling the organization as a member of the board.

Lamprecht brings more than a decade of management and economic policy experience to the role and six years of empowering women with Akilah. Over her Akilah career, she managed the Kigali campus, built local partnerships with the government and private sector, and developed the first-ever student loan program for Rwandan and Burundian women in higher education, among other accomplishments. Lamprecht looks forward to bringing her firsthand experience to the board and helping to scale Akilah’s career development model throughout East Africa.

About Lisa

When she joined Akilah in January 2011, Lisa Lamprecht was what you might call an über intern. She’d spent nearly a decade in the U.S. government, first serving as the right-hand woman to Robert Zoellick in his roles as U.S. Trade Representative and Deputy Secretary of State, and later moving on to focus on economic and trade policy. Lamprecht handled the Latin American and the Caribbean region specifically for the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce. She also spearheaded the development of the first-ever information-sharing platform and governance agreements for U.S. emergency responders with the Department of Homeland Security.

She might have been over-qualified as an intern, but at the time Akilah did not have a position to fit her qualifications. Committed to launching a new career path to empower girls and women globally, she persuaded the founder to allow her to come to Rwanda in a volunteer capacity.

Lisa was determined to prove her value, even if it meant doing the scut work necessary to sustain Akilah in its early years. “Alongside building our curricula, managing the campus, and coaching the Akilah team, I used to clean the toilet and bring the trash out to the burn hole because we didn’t have a budget for cleaners,” she recalls.

Lisa rose though Akilah’s ranks in record time, moving from intern to managing director of social enterprises to executive director in less than a year. She would go on to wear many hats as Akilah grew from a three-classroom building with 40 students to a full campus with nearly 400. Her favorite years at Akilah were 2011 and 2012, when she served as the head of the Rwanda campus and had the privilege of watching the first graduating class walk across the stage and shake hands with Jeanette Kagame, Rwanda’s first lady.

In the early years, Lisa enjoyed taking on different roles: from teaching to hiring to developing academic policies and networking with local and global audiences who were eager to discover what Akilah’s magic was all about. She led external revenue-generating programs to help sustain campus operations, including English language courses, a culinary training program, and a rural farming venture.

She grew with the organization and pushed to expand Akilah’s student services, particularly a student loan program. “That’s something I’m very proud of,” she says of the program. “Without financial help, half of our target demographic couldn’t enroll at Akilah, and that means we wouldn’t be able to achieve our mission,” she explains. Thanks to Lisa’s efforts, students can defer a large percentage of tuition until after they graduate and start careers.

Lamprecht also played a key role in launching Akilah’s Social Change Project. “I feel really strongly about giving back and sought to ensure this important education component did not get lost in the early iterations of the Akilah curricula,” she says. “Community service should be a cornerstone of our curriculum so that as we lift women up, they go on to do the same, and they become the next wave of changemakers.” Now all Akilah students are required to develop a Social Change Project for their communities and must complete at least 80 hours of community service.

Lamprecht’s biggest legacy may be her commitment to exhaustively examining new policies and programs to demand only the very best for students. “I’m the person double-checking decisions and policies as they are implemented to ensure we deliver the best products and services to our students,” she says.

Now she’ll bring that same analytical mindset to the board. Having played a pivotal role in building Akilah from the ground up, Lisa can help ensure that boardroom decisions make sense on campus. “I hope to serve as a bridge between the institute and the board,” she says.

As for Akilah’s future? By 2030, the institute aims to serve more than 40,000 East African women across a network of campuses. “It’s all about scale. Akilah is in demand,” she says. “The sky is the limit.”