A Moment with
A MOMENT WITH
SHADY ELKASSAS
A MOMENT WITH
PRIYA LAKHANI O.B.E
BY LEISA GRACE WILSON
H
ave you ever had a meeting
with someone which was
supposed to last for only 15
minutes but an hour or more
later you wonder where the time had
gone because the discussion and
the learning were so engaging. This
was how my chance meeting went
with Priya Lakhani O.B.E during the
JESS Innovation Summit in Dubai
late last year. Priya is the CEO of
CENTURY, a platform that uses
artificial intelligence to learn how
every brain learns. In this feature we
get to learn a little more about Priya
and the work that CENTURY is doing
in schools.
Priya was brought up in Cheshire,
near Manchester, where she went
to an independent school and later
a grammar school. She comes from
an East African Indian family whose
entire purpose throughout her
childhood was formal education. The
underpinning of that was to give her
opportunity and choice later in life.
She was always really entrepreneurial.
She and her elder brother would buy
and sell things for profit; anything
from chocolate bars to auction stock.
Priya decided at a very young age
that she wanted to be a barrister.
Her dad would encourage her to
go into courtrooms and watch the
proceedings. It was intense, but
exciting, and she liked the idea of
advocacy. Spending time in East
Africa as a child, Priya was struck
by all the poverty, and decided
that it was her job to change the
world for the better. As much as
she loved her career in law, Priya
found that she wasn’t changing the
world in the way she had hoped. Her
entrepreneurial spirit was strong and
working late nights, she saw a need
for something healthy and quick
to cook. Priya swapped her three-
piece suit for a tracksuit and created
her first company Masala Masala. It
was a social enterprise: for every pot
of sauce sold Priya fed a homeless
person a hot meal, helped to build
schools, and funded vaccines in
Africa.
Its success led Priya to join Vince
Cable’s advisory board when he
was Secretary of State for Business,
Innovation and Skills. This was where
she learned about the problems in
education and wanted to help. The
one-size-fits-all delivery of education
was inadequate and teachers weren’t
spending enough time doing what
they had signed up to do: teaching.
We’d gone from blackboard to
whiteboard but that was it in terms of
technology which can help teachers
and learners. Priya thought surely
there should be a more advanced
technology. So she launched what is
now CENTURY. Like Masala Masala,
it’s a social enterprise.