Gabriel Sanchez Zinny

Gabriel Sanchez Zinny (born January 11, 1974) is an entrepreneur and an expert on education and a promoter of the improvement of educational quality in the Americas. He was born in Switzerland, and raised in Argentina, where he lived until 1998 when he moved to the United States.
Education
Zinny studied Economics at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina and completed his Master's in Public Policy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Early career
Zinny began his career in Washington, DC, by coordinating the Human Trafficking Program at the United States Department of Health and Human Services. He then moved to the Inter-American Development Bank, where he worked to implement new technologies in the education sector. He also directed the Argentina Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars and was a senior fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
Zinny also served as vice president at Dutko Worldwide, a Washington, DC-based consulting firm, working on US government relations issues and Latin American business development.
In one of his early entrepreneurial initiatives, he founded Edunexo.com, a software company in the education sector dedicated to providing digital services for schools and universities and which grew to have fifty employees and a presence in five countries.
Current Activities
Zinny is the co-founder and president of Kuepa.com, a Latin American blended learning company, which provides education to adults that dropped out of high school and offers coursework for learning technical skills in high demand in the workforce.
He is a regular opinion columnist for several Latin American newspapers and the Huffington Post in the United States, where he shares perspectives on international politics, regional relations with the United States, Hispanic issues, entrepreneurship and education reform. Some of his articles include: "Social Impact Investment in Latin America: Lessons From Colombia", "The Debate Over the Role of Private Enterprise in Education", and "Mapping a New Era for Latin America, the United States and Europe". Zinny has co-authored four books on education policy: La Escuela Protagonista (1999), Educación y Nuevas Tecnologías: Moda o Cambio Estructural (2000), Tecnología y Gestión en la Educación Dominicana (2003), and And Now... Quality: Insights into the Education Policy Debate in Latin America (2011).
He currently serves as managing director for Blue Star Strategies, LLC, a consulting agency based in Washington D.C. where he focuses on the Latin America practice, specifically in the areas of infrastructure, education, energy, and international relations. He is also and adjunct fellow with the CSIS Americas Program and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.
Philosophy and Inspiration
Zinny is an active promoter of education reform in the Americas. Together with other experts and colleagues in the region, he pushes for innovation and the incorporation of information and communications technology (ICTs) into the classrooms, as a strategic input for the improvement of education quality. He sees this as especially important to close the achievement gap between students of different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and reduce their impact on students’ performance.
In spite of growing Latin American government education budgets - in both absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP - education quality has failed to improve. And in some areas, access and graduation rates for high school and higher education appear to be getting worse. This is challenging productivity and the sustainability of economic growth in the medium term.
According to different studies, the lack of interest and incentives has been pointed by students as some of the main reasons for dropping out of high school. But governments have remained reluctant to adapt to forces like globalization, technological innovation, and to encourage private players to provide new services in education.
Zinny sees this as symptomatic of the fact that Latin America, as is happening in other regions, is also facing a growing gap between the labor demand and workers’ skills. Innovation and ICTs are also tools to encourage more advanced skills, which are increasingly demanded by the corporate sector. Improving education, by inculcating both "hard" and "soft" skills that citizens need for 21st Century workplace, is strategic to increase economic and social mobility.
Writings and Commentary
Zinny publishes a regular column at the Huffington Post covering issues of Latino education, entrepreneurship, and economic development for the site's LatinoVoices vertical.
As well as a regular column at Latinvex.
His commentary is also published regularly in outlets both in the United States and Latin America, including the Latin Business Chronicle, Fox News Latino, the Brookings Center for Universal Education, and Americas Quarterly. In Latin America, his columns appear in Infobae and El Cronista in Argentina, Revista Capital and Diario Pulso in Chile, and La Republica in Colombia.
His most recent book, And Now...Quality, was written with co-author Esteban Bullrich, the current Education Minister of Buenos Aires City.

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