Sunny Varkey

Sunny Varkey was born in 1957 in Dubai to parents who had emigrated from Kerala, in southern India, in search of steadier work than was available at home. His mother, a trained nurse, opened a small school in 1959 to teach the children of fellow Indian expatriates who had no local schooling options, running it as a modest family concern rather than a business with any ambition to grow large.

Sunny left school himself at a young age to help support the family and worked for a period in the family's trading and construction interests before taking a closer role in the school in the 1970s, as Dubai's population of foreign workers began to expand rapidly alongside the emirate's oil wealth. He saw an opportunity that his parents had not had the resources to chase: building additional schools to serve the fast growing expatriate communities of teachers, labourers, engineers and professionals arriving from across Asia and beyond.

Over the following decades he expanded the family school into GEMS Education, eventually operating hundreds of schools across the Gulf, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, serving hundreds of thousands of pupils and becoming one of the largest private education operators in the world. The company has also faced criticism over teacher pay and conditions at some schools, tensions common in a fast growing private education business serving a wide range of family budgets.

Varkey has used part of his fortune to fund the Varkey Foundation, which each year gives the Global Teacher Prize to recognise outstanding teachers, a nod to the profession his mother had practised in that first small classroom.