Trustees

Paul Ellingstad is Chair of the Teach A Man To Fish Board of Trustees. He is a Managing Partner at PTI Advisors. Paul advises and accompanies leaders who want to innovate and grow by effectively navigating breakthrough change. He is a veteran of the technology sector and worked at iconic brands Gateway, Compaq, and HP. Paul is now Managing Partner at PTI Advisors, where he works with clients in all three sectors, especially on the growing importance of sustainability and responsible business in society. He is a lifelong learner and a systems thinker. He is passionate about mentoring and believes that mentors normally learn more than they can ever possibly teach. Paul is a fellow in the Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program, he serves as a director on several boards, he is a youth leadership advocate and a life-long member of the Scouting movement.

Nik Kafka is the founder and Chief Executive of TeachA Man To Fish. Leaving a successful banking career in the City of London for a local microfinance institution in Paraguay, Nik discovered an innovative school aiming not only to teach the poor how to become rural entrepreneurs, but to do so as a self-financing social enterprise. Having helped transform this school into a replicable model, and realising the huge potential for funding education through enterprise rather than charity, he returned to the UK to found Teach A Man To Fish.

To read Nik's full biography please see the 'Our Team' page

Sarah McMillan is an international development professional with over 15 years’ experience working on issues affecting youth. For the past decade, Sarah has undertaken a range of senior roles for a global network organisation, Youth Business International (YBI), which works with local partners in over 40 countries to promote and support youth entrepreneurship. Sarah has made a substantial contribution to the growth and development of the organisation and been responsible for designing and delivering some of the key services to the network.

Sarah has also worked for UNICEF, Save the Children, and Restless Development in education, health, and HIV/AIDS and has a Masters in Social Anthropology from SOAS, University of London.

Widely travelled, Sarah has a particular interest and affinity for South Asia and lived and worked for three years in Nepal. She has ambitions to one day support the establishment of a financially self-sufficient vocational school model for mountain regions, a vision that was inspired by a visit to Fundación Paraguaya’s agricultural school in Paraguay, and subsequent engagement and support from TAMTF. It was this experience and her continued passion for youth entrepreneurship, that drew Sarah to the TAMTF Board. Closer to home, Sarah is also on the Management Committee of a local youth club, Caius House, in Battersea London.

Hugh Johnson is an accountancy professional with over 8 years experience working with charities. Hugh is currently Senior Auditor with BDO LLP.

Previously he was a Senior Auditor with Lubbock Fine, where he led European Commission grant audits in the UK and in various countries throughout Europe. Hugh has also worked in various roles in the charity sector and has lived and worked in Kigali, Rwanda.

He has a BA in Politics and Development Studies from the University of Sussex and is an ACCA qualified accountant.

Jack McMahon is a strategic director specialising in community engagement, CSR, and corporate philanthropy. He is currently Head of Communities at PA Consulting and Head of the PA Foundation.

His previous roles include Director of strategy and partnerships within Standard Chartered's sustainability team and as a strategy consultant at PwC where he was the Portfolio Lead for DFID’s Girls’ Education Challenge.

He holds an MPhil in International Education from the University of Cambridge where he focussed on inclusive education.

Meera Pau Mehta is a global sustainability leader with over 20 years of experience driving strategies and partnerships to deliver positive business and social impact. She led the human rights program for Amazon’s worldwide operations, and prior to this she spent 10 years leading the social responsibility strategy for global steelmaker, ArcelorMittal, with a focus on supply chains and human rights. She has supported programme implementation across more than 20 countries, including Liberia, Ukraine, Bosnia, India and South Africa. Meera started her career at PwC where she was an Associate Director in PwC’s sustainability consulting group in London.

Meera has extensive experience working with multi-stakeholder initiatives and developing partnerships between the private sector and civil society organizations. She has been a member of the steering committee for the Responsible Minerals Initiative, working with civil society groups and businesses sourcing minerals from high-risk countries and is currently an advisor to Building Markets, a not for profit developing inclusive markets for small businesses.

Nadia Costanzo is Head of Banking for the Middle East, Africa and Latin America at Wise, one of the UK’s leading fintechs, where she leads market expansion in the regions through banking relationships, acquiring licenses and working with regulators on financial regulation.

Prior to Wise, Nadia worked in Nairobi for Kiva, a microfinance crowdfunding platform, where she was responsible for debt financing to MFIs across Africa as well as for developing Kiva’s technical assistance fund. Nadia previously worked on the Universal Financial Access agenda at the World Bank where she focused on the 25 countries with the highest number of unbanked people, as well as for Fundación Paraguaya in Asunción, Paraguay.

Nadia joined the Teach a Man to Fish Board in 2021.

Dr. Martin Burt, honorary trustee, is founder (1985) and CEO of Fundación Paraguaya, a social mission organization devoted to poverty elimination in the world through entrepreneurship. A pioneer in microfinance and youth financial literacy in Latin America, he developed one of the world’s first financially self-sufficient agricultural schools for the rural poor -creating a radical new model for education and providing the inspiration for Teach a Man to Fish's unique mission.

He has also created a new poverty measurement tool and coaching methodology called the "Poverty Stoplight" which allows poor families and private sector workers to self-diagnose their level of poverty across 6 dimensions and develop customized plans to overcome not only income poverty but also deprivations in 50 indicators.
In addition to his work in civil society, Martin was elected twice as president of the Paraguayan-American Chamber of Commerce, has served as Vice Minister of Commerce, was elected Mayor of Asunción and served as Chief of Staff to the President of Paraguay.
Martin has received numerous awards including the Microfinance Award for Excellence in Social Responsibility from the Inter-American Development Bank, the Outstanding Social Entrepreneur Award from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, the Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award, Spain's Novia Salcedo Foundation Prize for Excellence in Integrating Young People into the Workforce, and has received the UNESCO Orbis Guaraniticus Medal. He is a Synergos and Eisenhower Fellow.
He is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California Irvine and Visiting Professor in Social Entrepreneurship at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He serves on the Board of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship of the World Economic Forum and the Global Foodbanking Network.

Eduardo Gustale, honorary trustee, became interested in Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Innovation and Sustainability while finishing his degree in Sociology at the Universidad Católica de Chile. He was elected Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum & Chevening Scholar for an MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Warwick.

Until 2020 he headed the Poverty Stoplight team, a metric and methodology developed by Fundación Paraguaya that aims to change the way we measure and work with poverty worldwide. Eduardo is currently part of the Accelerator Lab Network Global Team, at the United Nations Development Program.