Ideo's Sandy Speicher Reimagines Education in Peru

Billionaire Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor wanted to reform education in Peru, his native country. While Peru’s economy has grown and stabilized, its education system remains one of the world’s worst. Rodriguez-Pastor, the chairman of financial services and retail conglomerate Intercorp, envisioned a new kind of school he could build into a larger network across Peru—while keeping tuition at just $100 a month. In 2010 he bought three private schools in Lima to get started, but how do you create a school system from scratch?

“You don’t want to mess this up,” says Sandy Speicher, the head of education practice at Ideo, a design and innovation firm founded in Palo Alto that works with both public- and private-sector clients. It’s “about understanding what design can do to help education systems progress.”