Nafez is the Managing Partner at Anara Impact Capital, a $50M fund that invests in learning, wellbeing, and environmental resilience across the MENA region. He co-founded BLDR, a venture studio focused on pioneering the future of work and learning in the MENA region by launching industry-leading edtech and fintech companies.
Nafez also founded Edraak.org, one of the largest open Arabic online education portals, which today reaches nearly 10 million learners across the MENA region. He served as the Executive Chairman of Edraak until late 2022.
He holds a master’s degree in educational neuroscience from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, where he focused on Arabic literacy. For his undergraduate work at Yale, Nafez completed a year-long, award-winning thesis on the obstacles to curriculum reform in the Middle East, using Jordan and the UAE as case studies. The Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government in the UAE published an executive summary of this work in 2011.
