Mathias Abawi Esmann
From distributing mosquito nets on foot through Sierra Leone to advising its Minister of Education, Mathias Esmann has spent two decades turning one RCN friendship into a career.
Two RCN students co-founded an NGO called Global Minimum somewhere around 2007. One was David Sengeh, from Sierra Leone. The other was Mathias Esmann, from Copenhagen. The organization ran public health projects and innovation programs in Sierra Leone and Kenya. In the summer of 2009, Esmann led an eleven-person team on foot through 33 villages in the Pujehun district, distributing mosquito nets to over 9,000 people. He was a Princeton undergraduate at the time and won the university's International Service Award for it the following year.
That early work set the direction for everything after. He went into consulting at Bain after Princeton, but Sierra Leone kept pulling him back. In 2021 he joined Sierra Leone's Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education as an Education Advisor, embedded from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. His former co-founder was the minister.
Together they worked on what became one of the more closely watched education reforms in sub-Saharan Africa. Sierra Leone removed school fees, allocated 20% of its budget to education, and saw enrollment jump by over a million children. Esmann and Sengeh co-authored pieces on international education financing in Brookings and the World Economic Forum, arguing that debt obligations were threatening to undo everything. In 2023, Esmann left for Harvard Kennedy School for an MPA, graduating in 2025 as a John F. Kennedy Fellow.
When the Trump administration moved to revoke Harvard's ability to sponsor foreign student visas that May, weeks before his graduation, he wrote in the Boston Globe: "We trembled. Would we graduate?" A Massachusetts court blocked the move. He graduated.
He is now back in Copenhagen working independently as a consultant. The arc from Flekke to Pujehun to Freetown to Cambridge and back is not the kind of thing you plan. It started with two teenagers at a school on a Norwegian fjord deciding they wanted to do something in Sierra Leone, and it has not really stopped since.
