After finding a love for learning in a concentration camp, Naida Kardas is fighting for children’s access to education worldwide

Naida Kardas vividly remembers the moment she fell in love with learning. Wandering the corridors of a school in former Yugoslavia as a five-year-old, she came upon the chemistry lab and inched in to take a look, brushing her fingers over the equipment and paging through textbooks she couldn’t yet read.

But this was not an ordinary day of lessons: this was a concentration camp during the Bosnian war. Naida was a prisoner there alongside her family, persecuted for being Muslim.

“One day, [the guards] saw me,” she adds. “They told my mum that if they ever saw me reading books again, they’d kill one of us.”

Despite this, Naida never stopped being curious. In fact, the fire burned brighter, and when the family was eventually freed after a year-and-a-half of near-starvation, she was intent on learning any way that she could.

As the family fled to the mountains, Naida begged her mum to let her go to school. “To get to school, we had to climb down the mountain avoiding fire, avoiding the men trying to rape and kidnap us. We lived in fear every day. I was the only Muslim kid there. I had no friends; nobody would talk to me.”

It was the unlikely friendship between Naida and her teacher that got her through those school days. “He was the only person who would speak to me, he protected me. He told me that he knew I was going to work in the education sector when I grew up.”

Years later, after quitting a job in a Fortune 500 company and retraining as a teacher in a lower-income school in the US, she came to Abu Dhabi and went on to set up non-governmental organisation Education 4.0 with her husband, Charif.

With a goal of creating an educational framework that would function around the world, Naida wanted to fight for the children that a traditional education system couldn’t reach.

“These kids reminded me of myself,” she reflects. “They aren’t able to be in school all the time. It’s my way of providing them what I didn’t get during my childhood.”

With the first phase of the programme running in Morocco – a country that ranks 73rd out of 76 nations for basic maths and science education – Education 4.0 develops apps and tech solutions that give children crucial access to the fundamental concepts of learning.

“That’s the thing: I feel like we create our own happiness and being sad doesn’t do anything,” she smiles. “When I was younger during the war, what does me being scared do? It does nothing. I look at life and know that things are temporary. Whatever’s next, I can handle it.”

WORDS Camille Hogg