The Educational Equality Institute (TEEI) was founded on a simple conviction: talent is equally distributed, opportunity is not — and girls pay the highest price for that injustice.
130 million girls are out of school worldwide. Girls in conflict zones are 2.5× more likely to be excluded than boys. Every year a girl stays out of school costs her up to 20% of her future income.
The ripple effects touch families, communities, entire economies.
We set out to build something that could change that equation — not through one-off programmes, but through digital infrastructure that scales. Mentorship platforms. Language learning networks. Upskilling academies. Technology that connects people to education when traditional systems fail them.
Then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Suddenly, millions of professionals, students, and families — many of them women — needed exactly what we had built. We responded. In three years, we've reached 20,000+ Ukrainians, delivered 10,000+ hours of volunteer mentorship and teaching, connected 8,000+ language learners with conversation partners across the globe, and matched 2,000+ mentees with 400+ professional mentors.
Ukraine proved the model. But Ukraine was never the end goal.
The platforms we built for Ukrainian women rebuilding careers are the same platforms that can serve a girl in Guatemala locked out of secondary school. The mentorship infrastructure that matches displaced professionals with volunteers worldwide is the same infrastructure that can connect first-generation students in the Bronx with someone who's walked their path.
We started for girls. We scaled through Ukraine. We're building for everyone the world has left behind.
