Melissa Gomes

Co-Founder and CEO of Edvolution Enterprise; a not-for-profit education company that focuses on leadership development, teacher empowerment and community engagement for schools and government. I was a Teach For Malaysia Fellow and have a combined 10 years of experience in management consulting and education. I develop the organisation's strategy, lead the government and corporate fundraising, and manage the organisation's development as we scaled from 4 to 8 staff in 4 years (this includes establishing HR, finance, and technology functions and supporting governance). I have a passion for education transformation for high need schools and I advocate for good leadership at all levels of the education system. I work closely with governments and corporate sectors to bring change to Malaysia's national schools. Present I currently lead an online system leadership program for 63 education leaders from the Malaysia MoE. It is an intensive 8-month capacity building focused on problem-solving, coaching & mentoring and data capacity. I am also leading an engagement with a global EdTech company to develop a literacy app for Bahasa Malaysia. Year 2017-2020 I led a district transformation initiative for a local education office in Penang, Malaysia. We worked with 20 system leaders, 14 school principals and 200 teachers. In the 3 years; we have reduced teacher absenteeism by 6%; increased students' learning by 22% and nearly 70% of our schools have recorded an increase in the number of students passing their national examination since joining the program. In 2019, we expanded to Perlis and worked closely with the State Education Department. In 1 year, the program enabled the state to help 96% of their underserved students to pass their national exam and has enabled 67 illiterate students to read in 5 months. These achievements have awarded Edvolution's leadership program as HundrED Global's top 150 global innovation in 2019 and MoE's 'New Model of Innovation'.