The Global Book Alliance is a collaboration between governments, intergovernmental organizations, nonprofits, and private companies that are committed to ensuring that all children have the books they need to achieve literacy. The Alliance is managed through a Secretariat hosted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a steering committee member.

Sakil Malik
Steering Committee
Chair

Sakil has served as GBA Chair since February 2023. Sakil is a veteran of international education, is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Global Center for Innovation and Learning. He has served as Vice President of Asante Africa Foundation, Senior Global Practice Lead for Global Education at DAI, Vice President of Global Development at World Learning Inc., and Director/COP for the Reading within Reach (REACH) Project and Global Reading Network (GRN) funded by USAID recently. He has more than 27 years of experience in international education project management, focused on early literacy, youth and higher education, social and human development and human rights. His portfolio at Creative Associates as the Senior Associate/Director was reducing school dropout across five countries; Tanzania, Timor Leste, Cambodia, India and Tajikistan. Before arriving at Creative, he was the Director of Global Operations at the International Reading Association (now International Literacy Association) in Washington, DC, where he led program management of literacy projects in 75+ countries building capacity of national reading associations, and provided strategic leadership and direction to the executive team and regional committees. He has successfully won and administered funding from government and corporate funders, including USAID, UNESCO, UNICEF, FCDO, GAC and many foundations and corporations. He has a Master’s Degree in International Educational Leadership and Policy from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, a Master’s Degree in Development Economics from Aligarh University in India, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce from Dhaka University in Bangladesh. He is a certified project manager with CIPM, CMMP and MPM certifications. Sakil has numerous publications and books in many languages. Sakil is originally a native of Bangladesh and is fluent in 4 languages. Sakil is currently based in a Maryland suburb in the USA.

Sergio ramirez-Mena
Steering Committee
deputy Chair

Mr. Sergio Ramirez-Mena has served as GBA Deputy Chair since February 2023.  He works as Senior Education Technical Advisor at IREX in Washington DC.  Before this, he served for 10 years as Chief of Party for flagship education projects including the All Children Reading Grand Challenge for Development (www.allchildrenreading.org), as well as USAID early grade reading projects in Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Honduras.  As an education COP, he has gained first-hand experience on book supply chain issues from the development and production of local books to the effective distribution of TLMs in both digital and printed form.   His technical background is in education management and information systems, instructional Edtech, digital literacy, education data analysis and visualization tools.  Mr. Ramirez-Mena holds a master's degree in project management from the George Washington University,  bachelor's degree in computer information science from the Franciscan University of Steubenville and a philosophy degree from the Catholic University of Louvain Belgium.  He is fluent in English, Spanish, and French, and is interested linguistics and instruction in local languages.