When Nabila Aguele ’05 stepped into the role of chief executive officer of the Malala Fund, it marked more than a leadership transition. It signaled a moment of alignment between her life’s work and a global mission centered on opportunity, equity and impact.

“It’s a big moment,” Aguele says. “It’s meaningful because of what it represents for where we are as an organization.”

That direction is clear. Under her leadership, Malala Fund continues to prioritize centering girls’ voices, supporting local activists, and driving policy and systems change. For Aguele, the work is grounded in proximity. Staying close to communities, she believes, leads to stronger decisions and more meaningful outcomes.

The role reflects a convergence of her professional journey. “Law, policy, advocacy and leadership are all coming together in service of girls and the futures they deserve,” she says.

That sense of purpose is deeply personal. Growing up in an environment where education was non-negotiable, Aguele saw early on what access to learning could make possible. Today, she carries that perspective into a global role where millions of girls are still denied that same opportunity.

Aguele is also an artist and a mother of three young children. She believes both shape how she approaches leadership. Parenting requires constant adjustment and clarity, while her creative practice encourages openness and new ways of thinking. Together, they influence how she navigates complexity and makes decisions, grounding her work in both purpose and perspective.

Her path to this moment was shaped in part by her time at AUWCL, where she found more than legal training. She found a community that treated questions of justice and human rights as immediate and real.

“It wasn’t just about learning the law,” she explains. “It was about being in a community that treated questions of human rights, justice, identity and humanity as real and urgent.”

That environment helped her understand that ambition and service are not in conflict but can be deeply aligned. It continues to influence how she leads, with a focus on whether systems and institutions truly serve people fairly.

Aguele’s experiences at AUWCL were both formative and far-reaching. As a student attorney in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, she built a foundation that led to a career in intellectual property and patent litigation, and later returned as a practitioner-in-residence.

Her work as a teaching fellow with the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project offered another perspective, bringing constitutional law into secondary school classrooms and highlighting questions of access and engagement. Service on the Faculty Appointments Committee provided insight into how institutions make decisions, while the Black Law Students Association offered a strong sense of community.

Together, these experiences shaped how she thinks about the law and its role in shaping systems and outcomes.

Her commitment to girls’ education and gender equality developed over time and sharpened during her work in government, where she saw how policy decisions directly affect access to opportunity.

“Consistently, it was women and girls who were being left behind,” she says, “often in ways that felt invisible in the system but had very real consequences.”

Working in Nigeria further underscored the broader implications. The issue was not only one of fairness, but of development. When girls are excluded from education, the impact extends beyond individuals to entire communities and economies.

That understanding continues to shape her leadership. Before becoming CEO, Aguele led Malala Fund’s work in Nigeria, where she saw the power of local solutions in action. A visit to a partner organization in Kaduna state remains especially vivid. There, girls participating in a safe spaces program spoke with clarity about their desire to stay in school and shape their own futures.

“That experience reinforced something I believe deeply,” she says. “Those closest to the challenge often see the clearest path forward.”

Now, as the first Africa-based CEO of Malala Fund, Aguele brings both a global perspective and a grounded understanding of the realities facing communities. For her, this is not symbolic. It is practical.

“Leadership that is closer to the work sees different things: the urgency, the nuance and the possibilities for change,” she says.

The scale of the challenge is significant. More than 120 million girls are out of school globally, and millions more are at risk of dropping out. Yet Aguele sees opportunity in shifting how the world approaches the issue.

That means placing girls and local actors at the center, supporting civil society, and ensuring governments not only adopt policies but implement them consistently. It also requires addressing broader issues such as education financing and national priorities.

Throughout her career, Aguele has drawn on experience across law, policy and business to navigate complex challenges. Legal training provided a foundation in analysis and persuasion, while policy work offered insight into how decisions are made and implemented. Together, these experiences have shaped a leadership approach that is practical, collaborative, and focused on solutions.

For current AUWCL students and alumni, her advice is straightforward.

“The path to impact is rarely linear. It is built over time through experience, relationships and a willingness to follow what feels meaningful,” she explains. “What matters is being honest about what personally aligns and building in a way that moves you closer to that.”

Looking ahead, Aguele remains focused on how decisions are made, whose voices are centered, and whether systems are truly serving the people they are meant to support.

In leading Malala Fund, she is not only advancing a global mission. She is helping redefine how that mission is carried forward, with girls themselves at the center of the work.