Nat Ware

Nat is an education-focused social entrepreneur who has dedicated his life to improving access to education around the world. He was born in one of the poorest suburbs in Australia to two school teachers. As a teenager, Nat focused on giving back directly through donations. He raised over $100,000 to rebuild a school in Mozambique near where his sponsor child lived. He became motivated to contribute smart capital and was passionate about achieving more impact at scale. He wanted to improve the effectiveness of educational organizations, so founded 180 Degrees Consulting (www.180dc.org), and built it into the world’s largest consultancy for nonprofits and social enterprises, with 160 branches across 35 countries and over 5.1 million hours of consulting services provided. Following this, he did a PhD on education finance at Oxford to get to the heart of the problem and develop a better way of doing it. As part of this PhD, Nat invented the Forte (Financing Of Return To Employment) financial mechanism to overcome the problems with existing approaches to education finance. Now, Nat has dedicated the rest of his life to making that idea happen.

Nat is a Rhodes Scholar, Visiting Fellow at Princeton, Forbes 30 Under 30 list-maker, Australian State Young Achiever of the Year, Goldman Sachs Global Leader, World Economic Forum Global Shaper, winner of the Oxford Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact Award, received the Highest Scoring Speech at the World Debating Championships, and is only-ever Two-Time Global Winner of the St Gallen Wings of Excellence Award.

Because of his entrepreneurial and academic work, Nat has been regarded by several publications as a global thought leader in social impact economics. In addition to doing a PhD, Nat completed an MBA and Masters in Development Economics at Oxford, where he was awarded the Saïd Prize for Top Oxford MBA Student and the Arthur Lewis Prize for Best Performance in Development Economics. Before that, he completed a degree in Economics (Honours) at The University of Sydney, where he was awarded the University Medal for Top Economics Student and the Convocation Medal for Best All-Rounder. Nat has also given several TEDx talks on social impact that have been viewed over a million times.