Geetha Murali is an honoree for the 2025 YPO Global Impact Award. The award focuses on YPO members making impact outside the organization that is both sustainable and scalable, affecting people, prosperity, peace or our planet.
Education is the most effective tool for addressing the world’s challenges — Geetha Murali lives her life by this belief.
As Chief Executive Officer of Room to Read, a global nonprofit dedicated to childhood literacy and gender equality, Murali doesn’t just preach the power of learning — she’s living proof of it.
In the pursuit of education, her mother, the oldest of seven in Chennai, India, resisted marriage at age 13 — a practice common in her family at the time — and chose a career in nursing. She, in turn, invested in and inspired her younger sisters to also live free from the limitations of generations past. Her mother’s career then brought her to the United States, where she got married — when she wanted to — and raised Murali with a love of learning and the life skills she’d need for success, no matter the path.
“Knowing that her decision is the reason I have the choices I do is a real driving force in my work,” says Murali, YPO member and one of the organization’s 2025 Global Impact Award honorees. “It was one woman’s decision at one moment that changed the trajectory of my whole family. I’m very proud to be her ripple effect.”
Reaching every child
Room to Read’s goal is to be the catalyst for millions of success stories just like Murali and her mother.
The organization was founded in 2000 with a simple but ambitious goal: Give children in communities facing deep educational, economic and gender inequities a real chance to learn and thrive. The organization has benefited more than 50 million children across 28 countries including India, Tanzania, the United States and Indonesia.
Room to Read’s literacy programming combines the science of reading with the magic of loving to read to help children become independent readers and lifelong learners, while its gender equality programming supports adolescents, particularly girls, to develop life skills that help them overcome gender inequality, with a focus on family and community engagement as well as mentorship.
Murali, who earned her Ph.D. in South Asian politics and whose career spans leadership roles in both the corporate and nonprofit sectors, first connected with the organization through Erin Ganju, a former YPO member from California and the Co-Founder and then CEO of Room to Read. She joined the organization in 2009 and was appointed CEO in 2018 and now leads a global team of 1,200 staff across 60 offices, overseeing operations, fundraising and the nonprofit’s growing influence in policy and education reform.
Rooted in community, designed for impact
Room to Read’s success stems from being deeply embedded in the communities it serves. Ninety percent of its staff are local leaders and educators who directly implement programs, ensuring solutions are contextually relevant and culturally effective from Pakistan to the Philippines.
“We don’t take lightly the fact that we are asking families to trust in our work and to educate their children when they have other choices,” Murali explains. “Many times, it’s not that they don’t want what’s best for their children, but that they’re trying to assess what’s in the best interest overall. Because if a young woman has to walk a very long distance to go to school, she may not be safe, or if there are many children at home and they need income, they’re thinking about feeding them. So, they’re always balancing quite difficult choices.”
Understanding these realities, Room to Read works closely with families and communities to create educational opportunities that make sense for them.
“Our core identity is that we’re direct implementers. Our community-based staff deliver our programs along with local stakeholders, gathering ongoing feedback and measuring outcomes,” she says. “We are co-designing with the communities, and our teams are always looking at how to evolve our delivery to meet the need.”
Sometimes, the evolution of the delivery, quite literally, has to be reimagined.
When the pandemic hit, 1.6 billion children globally were out of school. Most of Room to Read’s programs were embedded in schools, so they had to rethink how to reach children – and fast.
— Geetha Murali, CEO Room to Read
The organization’s mentors continued sessions remotely via phone when they couldn’t in person, and Murali recounts how Room to Read staff got creative delivering learning materials by radio, television, boat and, even, camel.
“We were immediately able to look at the need, look at the local infrastructure and find ways to keep children learning at a time when there were so many other things at the forefront of what society was focused on,” she remembers. “We were using everything available to us to support the children.”
The result? Ninety-five percent of the girls in their programs returned to the classroom when schools reopened — despite the increased risks of child marriage, labor exploitation and other pressures that pulled girls away from education during that time.
“We had to make sure that we were keeping that human connectivity in place,” she says.
Systemic Success
Being in communities is just one part of Room to Read’s success. Scaling impact means working with governments, public school systems and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to create lasting reform.
In 2023 the organization trained more than 72,500 teachers and librarians, as well as more than 4,800 government officials in literacy-related topics and more than 150 government officials in gender and girls’ education to build skills that support productive education systems. In many countries, Room to Read is the only NGO invited to join national advisory committees shaping curriculum, gender policies and library standards.
“We describe ourselves as simultaneously local, regional and global,” Murali says. “When you run programs in multiple locations, you have opportunities for learning across different regions of the world, as well as the opportunity to share your findings with the sector.”
And all this work? It’s working: Evaluations show that children in Room to Read’s Literacy Program don’t just read — they outperform. They read twice as many words per minute as their peers and answer twice as many comprehension questions correctly. More importantly, they’re building lifelong reading habits.
For their girls’ education program, the results are just as powerful: In a recent global survey of five-year alumnae, 79% had either been enrolled in higher education and/or were employed. Many go on to become mentors in the program themselves — proof that the ripple effect is very real.
Scaling for the future
Room to Read has expanded at a pace that few nonprofits achieve. In just the past four years, they’ve served as many children as they did in their first 20 years. And Murali’s goals for Room to Read all involve benefitting more children, faster. That means continuing their systemic work with schools and governments, but they aren’t stopping there.
The organization has expanded its multimedia efforts, including publishing 4,600 original and adapted children’s books in 57 languages. That’s on top of the 42 million books they have distributed globally and the 3,000 children’s book titles available in 41 languages via their digital library, Literary Cloud.
— Room to Read CEO Geetha Murali on her mother’s impact share
In 2023 the organization released the first nonprofit-led animation and live-action film project, “She Creates Change,” to promote gender equality through the stories of young women around the world.
It’s all about meeting children where they are, while ensuring that education remains a global priority.
“I’m always surprised I’m advocating for this; it seems so obvious that children need the skills to make choices, stay in school and to invest in themselves, their families and their communities,” Murali says. “But we’re committed to ensuring that the urgency around education continues to be at the forefront of what the world thinks about when it thinks about creating positive change. This work is an imperative need for the next generation to thrive.”
