Lydie Hakizimana

Currently, Lydie Hakizimana is the Founder and CEO of Happy Hearts, a chain of preschools that is providing quality education to hundreds of children between the ages of 18 months and five years old in Rwanda. She is also the co-founder of Drakkar Ltd, a publishing house that serves more than 3,000 schools in Rwanda.

She previously worked at Harvard University on a project to scale up her schools by providing quality early education and creating educational programs accessible to all. She earned a Master’s Degree in Public Administration (MPA) from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In 2018, Lydie was appointed as a board member of the African Leadership University (ALU). In 2019, ALU was named one of the most innovative companies in the world (#1 in Africa) by the influential magazine Fast Company. Lydie also sits on the board of the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences
(AIMS).

Lydie Hakizimana is a recipient of numerous awards among others the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellowship in 2013 and the Mandela Washington Fellowship in 2016. Prior to this, Lydie worked for OTF Group, a Boston based consultancy firm founded by Michael Porter among others. At OTF, Lydie advised the government of Rwanda and Gabon in Information Communication Technologies, the Hides and Skin and Timber industry respectively. Lydie is a certified Montessori teacher from the North American Montessori Center (NAMC) in Canada.