Karim Pirbay

Karim Pirbay is a Program Specialist at Schmidt Futures. In this role, he directly contributes to the design and implementation of events and partnerships that Schmidt Futures and its beneficiaries can rely on to strengthen their work as well as their impact.

Karim actively participates in the NGO Keelonga in his home country of Madagascar, which he co-founded in 2007. The NGO now ensures free tuition to over 2,500 children in rural areas of Antananarivo and restores school premises in the event of natural disaster. It is in Madagascar that Karim wrote an encyclopedia on the island’s 100+ lemur species that was published free of charge on the Apple App Store.

Prior to Schmidt Futures, Karim joined Endeavor’s Beirut office in its efforts to support local high-impact, high-growth enterprises irrespective of their industry with the objective of catalyzing their growth internationally. He spent the two years before that in Gujarat and Ladakh, in western and northern India respectively, working in education. In the former, he taught practical philosophy at Shreyas Foundation and helped its instructors adopt a novel set of tools to enhance their teaching, while he contributed to the fundraising efforts for the launch of the region’s very first university in the latter.

Karim holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Philosophy tailored to the department’s “Mind, Brain, and Behavior Track” with a secondary in Economics. He spends a significant amount of his time convincing relatives his degree is not entirely useless.