Anne Kjær Bathel
Founder and Managing Director, ReDI School of Digital Integration
Anne is CEO and co-founder ReDI School of Digital Integration. She is a 2006 graduate from KaosPilot in Denmark, a hybrid of a business and a design school. From 2006-2009, she worked as a corporate social responsibility consultant. In that capacity, she developed and implemented Samsung Electronics’ award-winning corporate social responsibility strategy for Scandinavia. In July 2010, Anne moved to Japan, where she spent 2 years researching open social innovation and received the prestigious Rotary Peace Fellowship. She wrote her master thesis in Silicon Valley with OpenIDEO. In 2012, she moved to Berlin to set up the Berlin Peace Innovation Lab, which is associated with Stanford University. The lab focuses on how technology is facilitating emerging and measurable social change toward global peace. In 2015, in response to the refugee crises, Anne co-founded ReDI School of Digital Integration, a vocational training program teaching programming and tech skills to refugees and marginalised people. ReDI is currently teaching 3000+ adults and kids per year. 60% of these are women and girls.
Anne was recognised by Edition F as one of "25 Women" revolutionising German industry and by Handelsblatt as "Mutmacher of the Year"(2018). She was awarded Best Female Social Entrepreneur of the year in Germany 2020 and Ashoka Fellow in 2021.
Featured work
Digital reskilling: empowering under-resourced communities on both sides of the Atlantic
What skills are needed for the digital future, and how can governments and companies support the retraining of people who lack these skills?