Thaphaung Awar

Artist, Business leader, Entrepreneur, Photographer, Startup, World traveler, Writer/Editor

Thaphaung Awar is the Director of Administration at the London Institute of Business and Technology, a British higher education provider delivering business management and related qualifications across international markets. With a background spanning finance, marketing, and higher education administration, she has been part of the institution's leadership since 2017, helping shape the operational and financial foundations that support its growth. She has also served as executive producer of Outreach Asia, a startup-focused talk show produced by the institute, and has championed initiatives that give young entrepreneurs early exposure to the realities of building a business. Her work reflects a belief that access to the right environment and support at the right moment can meaningfully change a person's trajectory, an idea she carries into both her operational leadership at the Institute and her advocacy for the next generation of founders and professionals.

I believe the biggest barrier to opportunity isn't talent, or even money — it's proximity. Most people who go on to build something remarkable can point to a moment when they were simply close enough to try: close to a mentor, close to a network, close to an environment that let them fail cheaply and learn fast. For everyone else, the door isn't locked so much as it's just too far away to reach. In education, we tend to solve this with more content — more courses, more credentials, more information. But content was never really the scarce resource. Access was. Working inside a higher education institution has shown me, again and again, that the students who transform fastest aren't necessarily the most gifted; they're the ones who finally got put in a room where the stakes were real and the hierarchy was thin. That's what draws me to startup environments as a teaching tool, not just a business model. When you put a young person inside something being built in real time — no layers of management to hide behind, no filtered communication, consequences that show up the same week — something shifts in how they see their own capability. It compresses years of confidence-building into months. My idea worth spreading is this: if we want to close opportunity gaps, we should spend less energy perfecting curricula and more energy manufacturing proximity — deliberately engineering the rooms, mentorships, and early, low-stakes exposure to real stakes that let people discover what they're capable of years before the world would otherwise let them find out. Access, not aptitude, is the lever we've been underusing all along.