Changing the world by educating children
Tariq Fancy believes he can change the world.
So much so that the Torontonian abandoned a very lucrative position as the youngest partner at a Wall Street investment firm and turned in his keys to a loft in Greenwich Village so he could come home to share an apartment over a noodle house on Baldwin St., earn no salary and chew through his savings.
He did all that because of his faith in The Rumie Initiative, a non-profit organization he began in 2013 to educate children in developing countries. Rumie distributes tablets preloaded with textbooks, interactive lessons and other instructive tools to areas where there’s little or no access to education.
Fancy’s brainchild is projected to dispense 30,000 of the $50 tablets in 2015, largely targeting Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kenya, with an emphasis on getting them into the hands of girls in places where it is often impossible or dangerous for them to go to school. An important focus in 2014 was Liberia, where Ebola forced the closure of schools.
The tablets are ingenious and impressive. They can hold up to 10,000 textbooks and be updated online. But they are designed to be self-contained and used in areas where there is little or no Internet access. Due to long battery life, it costs less than a dollar a year to keep them powered.
“A library for the cost of a book” is how Fancy describes one of the tablets.
“The simple goal is to lower the economic barriers to an education,” says the 36-year-old, who exudes contagious passion for the project. “The one thing that can improve the world the most is education. There are so many problems we could solve — climate change, human rights, poverty, war . . . The best way to solve them is to educate a billion kids who are underserved today. If you give tomorrow’s adults all the tools, they’ll be able to solve all those problems.”
The initiative has caught the attention and financial backing of some heavy hitters in the business world including the recently retired CEO of TD Bank, Ed Clark, and Rob McEwen, the chairman and chief owner of McEwen Mining Inc.
“When you look at education and the positive impacts it has on standard of living, crime levels and eradication of poverty, and we have this growing inequity in the world, I thought this is an ideal thing to get behind,” says McEwen, who has contributed $500,000.
“I was very impressed by Tariq himself, what he had accomplished both academ- ically and business-wise and that he was pushing that aside to lead the charge on trying to educate parts of the world (without) access to schools and regular education.” So why does a man who was educated at the University of Toronto Schools and four universities — Brown, Oxford, the Inst. of Political Science in Paris and the international business school INSEAD — pack it all in for an idealistic dream?
Fancy said it was a combination of boredom and the sense he was “living somebody else’s dream . . . I think there are diminishing returns at some point in making money. As long as you’re comfortable, the real focus ought to be on what actually . . . excites you.”
Some insight into Fancy’s life helps understand what drives him. His parents are from Kenya and of South Asian background. His dad worked for Air Canada, so he spent much of his youth travelling. He grew up with a sense of the bigger world and its disparities.
There were also personal experiences that dramatically shaped Fancy’s perspective. He recalls two of his mother’s brothers, both brilliant. One was healthy and became a top lawyer; the other took ill, was in a wheelchair and struggled to pursue his education in Nairobi before dying relatively young.
It troubled Fancy that someone “super intelligent, super capable” didn’t get adequate access to education.
Then, when studying in France, Fancy’s best friend, who had a passion for charitable work, contracted cancer. He died in 2013. Fancy visited his grave in Amsterdam and was overcome with a feeling that he had to do more with his life.
“Standing there, I just thought to myself, the only thing to differentiate between me and him is luck. Frankly, the same thing with my uncle in Nairobi — why did he not get the chance to have an education or the chance to fall in love and get married? He was unlucky. At that point, it was like I was at the end of a diving board and it pushed me,” says Fancy, who will marry Meher Zaidi next year. She is of Pakistani origin, born and raised in Dubai.
“I’ve been lucky in life. I’ll never be living on the street, I don’t think, but I don’t want to live with regrets. If I can give the next five years to something I’m absolutely convinced will change the world, I’ll just do it. I don’t care if I have to work 100 hours a week or burn through my savings or whatever. ”