Ashley Shuyler

Ashley Shuyler is the founder of AfricAid, a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education in Africa in order to provide young women with the opportunity to transform their own lives and the futures of their communities. Since its inception in 2001, AfricAid has raised over $600,000 in its mission to support girls’ education in Africa.

Shuyler was born in 1985 and grew up in Houston, Texas and Golden, Colorado. Her parents are Nina and Richard Shuyler.

Education

During a trip to Tanzania in 1996, Shuyler learned that only a small fraction of girls in Tanzania are able to obtain an education beyond the primary school level. In response to that experience, she founded AfricAid. As a student at Colorado Academy in Denver at the time, Shuyler came to believe that education is the most crucial component of any long-term solution to the many challenges facing Africa, particularly in the areas of health and inequality. After high school, Shuyler attended Harvard University, where she continued to explore issues of international development in the third world. During her time there, she conducted research in several Maasai communities and served as a teacher in rural regions of Tanzania, India, and China. Shuyler's thesis at Harvard provided an assessment of Tanzania’s system of national examinations. She graduated from Harvard in 2008 and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at that time.

AfricAid

Shuyler received the Pforzheimer Public Service Fellowship from Harvard in 2008 in order to grow the work of AfricAid. Her work includes traveling to give presentations in conjunction with Somebody Like Me, a documentary film she recently produced about life in a rural Maasai village. Shuyler travels to Tanzania almost every year in conjunction with her ongoing work at AfricAid. In 2007, KidHaven Press published a biography about Shuyler by Rachel Lynette for its Young Heroes series.