Nangyalai Attal

Nangyalai Attal is an Echidna Global Scholar at the Brookings Institution.  He recently served as the senior policy specialist at Afghanistan's Technical and Vocational Education and Training Authority (TVET-A).  He is the founder of the nonprofit organization Hode—meaning "a resilient decision"— dedicated to promoting girls' education in rural areas.    

Nangyalai received international recognition in 2014 when the UN Envoy for Global Education awarded him the UN Youth Courage Award for his work in girls' education and the Hopes and Challenges Award in 2016 from former Afghan President Hamid Karzai.  The Asia Foundation selected Nangyalai for the highly competitive Development Fellows Program.  As an educator, he served as a lecturer at the Dunya University of Afghanistan and the National Institute of Management and Administration (NIMA). He also briefly served in 2017 as director of the Presidential Decrees and Orders Department in the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff in Afghanistan.

Nangyalai is completing his Ph.D. in International Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2015, which he used to obtain an M.S. in Human Resources from Golden Gate University in San Francisco.