Putting gender equality at the heart of education
Dana Schmidt is a senior program officer for Echidna Giving, a private funder with one sole aim: getting more girls into better schools to live better lives. Dana leads Echidna Giving's grantmaking strategy on early childhood development and co-leads grantmaking on adolescent skills and mindsets.
Before joining Echidna in 2016, Dana was a program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where she helped to develop and run a ten-year, $125 million grantmaking initiative to improve the quality of education that children receive in the developing world. While at Hewlett she oversaw grantmaking related to education in India and East Africa. In addition, she led the Foundation's international grantmaking for Open Educational Resources (OER).
Earlier in her career, Dana spent time teaching secondary school students in both Kenya and Zambia. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with an undergraduate degree in Economics and African Studies and earned her master's degree in International Educational Administration and Policy Analysis from the Stanford University School of Education. Her master’s thesis explores the impact of the elimination of primary school fees on enrollment in Kenya.
