Our Founders

Originally from Ghana, West Africa, Fred has lived and worked in South Africa for several years, and spent his formative years in four other African countries before attending university and graduate school in the United States. These international experiences taught Fred that having a worldview is especially important in today’s increasingly interdependent world, and provided him with the inspiration to create Global Leadership Adventures. Fred is a graduate of Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, USA, and helped to manage one of the top-performing schools in Botswana before attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Today, Fred runs a high school in South Africa called the African Leadership Academy.

Andrew has extensive experience operating international educational programs around the world, including serving two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. His overseas volunteer experience ignited a passion to share that experience with others, and he became vice president at a non-profit international volunteer organization. There, he helped build programs from scratch into a network of 14 countries and 2,500 volunteers, before going on to co-found Terra Education. Andrew is a graduate of Lawrence University and speaks Spanish and Portuguese. In addition to international education, he enjoys studying languages, anthropology and technology, and loves spending time with his two daughters at their home in San Diego.

Peter is a Co-Founder of Terra Education. He spent his last 15 years working across Africa before joining Terra Education full-time in 2016. Peter was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company in Duesseldorf before transferring to Johannesburg. He later co-founded and co-ran Tana Africa Capital; now a leading Africa-focused investment company. Peter is a German citizen; he holds a Master’s degree with honors in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Aachen, an honors degree in Law from the University of Hagen, and a degree in Economics from the University of Bayreuth. In his limited spare time (Peter and his wife Busi have three children, which are a great joy), Peter likes to meet friends and play chess.

Chris brings a hybrid background in business and education to his work designing and building educational institutions of excellence. He previously worked with the Procter and Gamble Company, the Boston Consulting Group, The Broad Foundation, and at Oundle School. He holds a BA degree summa cum laude in Economics from Yale University and an MBA and MA in Education from Stanford University. As a graduate student at Stanford University, Chris and fellow GLA Co-Founder, Fred Swaniker, began to build African Leadership Academy, an institution that seeks to transform Africa by identifying, developing, and connecting future generations of leaders from across the continent.