Alina Amir

Alina is the co-founder and CEO of Arus Education, an education social enterprise that offers engaging and exciting learning experiences through a multi & interdisciplinary approach. Arus’ programme covers Financial, Media and Information, and Digital Literacies with Global Citizenship Education themes for teachers and students to explore learning in real-world contexts. Arus has impacted more than 200,000 students and 100,000 teachers across Malaysia, and their learning content has over a million views.

With ten years of teaching experience, Alina has poured her knowledge into teaching, innovative content development and teacher coaching, focusing on high-need schools and marginalised communities, including the stateless community in Malaysia. Throughout her time at Arus, she led a nationwide initiative to promote Global Citizenship Education (GCED) by developing project-based learning resources for teachers and students as part of Arus’ collaboration with the Ministry of Education & UNICEF Malaysia. In 2020, as part of the COVID response in education, she led the development of Komuniti Guru Digital Learning to support and help teachers transition to online teaching and learning. This effort was mentioned in UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Brief 2020, “Promising practices for equitable remote learning: Emerging lessons from COVID-19 education responses in 127 countries”. She is currently leading the financial literacy movement at Arus, which has reached more than 30,000 students this year and oversees the initiatives for STEM, Media and Information Literacy projects under Arus.

In 2021, Tatler named Alina one of Asia’s Most Influential Malaysian Educators. She has also represented Arus & Malaysia at various national and international events to share innovation in education, including TEDx, Khazanah MegaTrends Forum and Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai.

Alina has a degree in Actuarial Science from the University of Illinois and a post-graduate diploma in Education from Universiti Utara Malaysia.

Making an impact means seeing my students be brave and informed to advocate for themselves, seeing the teachers I work with be inspired and continue to be part of our learning community, and seeing our alumni returning to continue the work we started.