Not as important as we think we are

Malik Ahmad Jalal — Emerging Global Leader Award recipient

Ahmad Jalal remembers the moment on September 15, 2008, when the news broke that Lehman Brothers, the venerable Wall Street investment bank, had collapsed. On the trading floor at Goldman Sachs’s London office, where he worked, there was an uproar; but he felt a perfect calm, even an epiphany. “We are not as important as we think we are,” he remembers thinking.

He had been on a fixed path until that point: Leaving his native Pakistan to study at the London School of Economics, he went on to become an accountant at Deloitte before joining Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. But instead of looking for safety in the great storm that followed the 2008 crash, he decided to take a leap of faith.

There are more important things to explore and to do

He resigned to follow the intuition he’d had that day on the trading floor: that there was a world out there to explore beyond the financial one he had come to inhabit. Growing up in Pakistan, he had been confronted daily by the lack of social justice and basic amenities. Development wasn’t an intellectual concept, he says — it was a reality. Wanting to explore how economies developed and how they could grow in a way that didn’t cause the great imbalances that had led to the financial crisis, he came to the Kennedy School attracted by the Master’s in Public Administration/ International Development (MPA/ID).

The school opened his eyes, he says. “All of a sudden I was engaging with people who had very different experiences from me” — journalists, human rights advocates who had been imprisoned, public servants, and private sector leaders who wanted to give back.

His time at HKS enabled him to learn languages other than that of the private sector — those of development and of the public and nonprofit sectors — and to realize that behind those different languages were very similar objectives.

As CEO of The Aman Foundation, Pakistan’s largest private foundation, he now speaks them all fluently, helping to fuse different approaches and stakeholders in the interests of development. The foundation is focused on sustainable impact in health care and education in some of the most challenging parts of Karachi, directly providing high-quality services ranging from ambulances to vocational training.

For his work, Ahmad Jalal is being recognized with the Kennedy School’s Emerging Global Leader Award.

It’s a tremendous honor, and an acknowledgment that I’m on the right path of public service

Ahmad Jalal is the CEO of The Aman Foundation, Pakistan’s largest private foundation dedicated to sustainable impact within health care and education. He was managing director at the Abraaj Group, where he led investments for the Global Healthcare Fund across South Asia and Africa; he also spearheaded the creation of the Pakistan Small Midcap Fund. Prior to that, he was an executive director with Goldman Sachs in investment banking and the principal investments area.

He started his career with Deloitte in London. Ahmad qualified as a chartered accountant, received his MPA/ID from HKS, and his BSc from the London School of Economics. Ahmad is the founding director of Pakistan Fast Growth 100, chairman of the board of Injaz-Pakistan (part of Junior Achievement Worldwide), and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was the opinions editor of the HKS Citizen and is passionate about travelling and history.