Ex-hedge fund manager founds school in Somaliland
In 2008, a man named Jonathan Starr was 32 years old and running a hedge fund in Boston. He was a millionaire, but he didn’t like his job very much, and wanted to do something to give his life purpose. He’d heard about a desperately poor African nation called Somaliland that needed help. Somaliland broke away from Somalia 25 years ago. If you’ve never heard of it before, it’s probably because it still isn’t recognized as an independent country.
Jonathan Starr went there for a visit, and that’s when he came up with a kind of crazy idea. He decided to build an American-style boarding school to help kids in Somaliland get into the best universities in the U.S. and beyond. Starr hoped his students would then return to Somaliland as doctors, lawyers, business people, and future leaders.
It’s not easy to get to the school Jonathan Starr built. Somaliland’s capitol Hargeisa, isn’t exactly a bustling metropolis. There are few flights in, and once you’re here, it’s a bumpy ride on dusty dirt roads, past miles and miles of empty scrubland. The school sits on a remote hilltop, in what can best be described as the middle of nowhere.
It’s called the Abaarso School of Science and Technology, a boarding school that’s home to around 200 of Somaliland’s best and brightest, grades 7-12.
Anderson Cooper: What’s the goal of the school? What’s the idea of the school?
Jonathan Starr: So the mission of the school is to produce ethical and effective leaders of the country in the future.
Anderson Cooper: Future leaders of Somaliland.
Jonathan Starr: Somaliland, Somalia. The point is they’ll be future leaders in this area. And that should be everything. That should be business, government, law, health care– and we have students studying everything. So ultimately, it should work that way.
There was no guarantee it would work that way when Abaarso began accepting students in 2009…but Jonathan Starr was determined. He’d moved to Somaliland and has spent more than half-a-million dollars of his own money building the school, recruiting the students…and hiring the teachers, nearly all of whom he found online.
