Amira Yahyaoui: A Human Rights Activist And Entrepreneur Championing Financial Aid Literacy

Graphic by Janice Kim

Amira Yahyaoui didn’t choose to be a human rights activist. Throughout her childhood, she aspired to be an astronaut, an architect. She wanted to go to law school, she wanted to study mathematics and geophysics in college. Instead, she found herself exiled from her own country at 17. 

Tunisia was under the authoritarian regime of former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. “High unemployment, poverty, and political repression” fuelled civil unrest and eventually public protests. Tunisians demanded President Ben Ali step down; they would not accept the injustices they faced under corrupt leadership, and neither would Amira. 

“We were born in a democracy, a democratic house within a dictatorship,” Amira says about her family dynamic. “That makes you not accept silence and shutting up because you're too young to understand the consequences of speaking up. But also it becomes your DNA to be free. And it's very hard to basically bend the knees of a free man, you know?”  

Amira made it her goal to help bring the democratic principles she bore witness to in her own home back to the rest of her country. She spent years as an immigrant without papers in France, known as sans papiers. While this status prevented her from receiving a formal education in France, Amira was determined to learn. She acquired a fake ID and managed to take college courses, risking her safety for the education she deserved, all the while knowing she wouldn’t be able to receive a degree. 

Amira Yahyaoui, photo courtesy of Mos

Through social media, Amira was able to continue advocating for justice from abroad, connecting with other activists from Tunisia. Those who were still in the country during the Jasmine Revolution would send Amira videos of the protests she helped organize and she would disseminate the footage online to raise awareness.  

On January 14, 2011, the Tunisian dictatorship finally came to an end. Amira was able to return home, passport in hand. 

Upon her return, she founded Al Bawsala, “a non-governmental organization under Tunisian non-profit law” that is “independent of any political influence,” as its website states. The organization is committed to keeping the Tunisian government in check and protecting human rights. It leads four projects that focus on increasing citizen participation in policymaking and increasing legislation’s transparency. The project Never Again, for example, monitors the “transitional justice process” to ensure the same mistakes that put people’s rights at risk don’t happen again.  

As recognition for her work with Al Bawsala and human rights activism, Amira received the Vital Voices Global Trailblazer Award (2012), the Prize for Conflict Prevention from Fondation Chirac (2014), and the Lindebrække Prize for Human Rights (2014), to name a few. Amira also served as co-chair at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland (2016) and board member of UNHCR’s Advisory Group on Gender, Forced Displacement, and Protection (2015-2019). 

Her reputation, influence, and tenacity have opened many doors for her. When thinking about her next venture, in true Amira fashion, she decided to focus on helping people once again. 

“I think my mission in life and the theme that I am obsessed with is the theme of dignity, of human dignity, of access to dignity,” she says. 

Amira’s unorthodox educational experience may very well be the reason for her “extreme optimism,” as she calls it. Amira doesn’t believe in asking for permission, especially when it comes to solving social issues. 

After interviewing more than a hundred families in the US on what they believed their greatest socio-economic obstacles were, it became clear to Amira that families were concerned with the price of education getting in the way of their children’s success. College education has become increasingly expensive, leaving approximately 44 million Americans with more than $1.6 trillion in student debt. To address the financial aid crisis in the US, Amira founded Mos, a banking app that helps students receive financial aid and manage their money. 

While traditional education, and the continuous struggle to receive it, is relevant to Amira’s personal story, this is not about her. 

“For me, it's the people we're building for. I want to build solutions that make the 99% advance in their financial life,” she explains. 

Ever since 2018, Mos has functioned as a service that matches students with every dollar of financial aid available to them, providing financial aid coaches to help students negotiate directly with universities for extra funding. Now, it serves as a financial technology company providing banking services, with the scholarship-finding feature built-in for free, and students will have access to “coaches” who can help them navigate aid, loans, and other aspects of their financial life. The debit card they provide won’t have fees of any kind, since the last thing students need is more debt.

As they addressed young people’s needs, Amira and the Mos team realized many of them thought they only needed to fill in the FAFSA, and in doing so missed out on thousands of dollars worth of financial aid. Not student loans, financial aid. We’re talking free money. 

Amira Yahyaoui, photo courtesy of Mos

Amira and the Mos team realized that many young people thought they only needed to fill in the FAFSA, and in doing so missed out on thousands of dollars worth of financial aid. Not student loans, we’re talking free money. 

“The problem with accessing financial aid is that most of the misinformation comes from a place of ignorance and bad communication,” Amira explains. “I would say weirdly in higher education, most of the misinformation comes from the most well-intentioned people.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated financial instabilities, making access to financial aid resources more crucial than ever. To supplement their services, Mos created a “COVID-19 Guide” in order to alleviate the anxiety they knew students were feeling during these unprecedented times. The guide includes advice (“read emails carefully, and call or email your school directly if you have questions”), templates for students to effectively communicate their specific financial requests and questions to their school’s financial aid office, and other resources.

“I think my mission in life and the theme that I am obsessed with is the theme of dignity, of human dignity, of access to dignity.”

Mos also launched the Black Students Matter Scholarship, which funds student activists and campus leaders fighting to end racial injustice everywhere–including in our education system. Any Black student applying to, or enrolled in, college or graduate school who is involved in a racial justice movement is eligible to apply. So far, this scholarship program has awarded 40 Black students with diverse academic and extracurricular interests. Awardees include students such as Christian Gines (2021), who advocated for Black voter turnout in Mississippi and published poems and articles on civic engagement, anti-Black violence, and other topics related to race in America; another recipient of the scholarship was Tyne Dickson (2021), a social justice activist majoring in Human Rights and Theatre, with minors in Public Policy and International Affairs as well as a passion for app development. Tyne combined her interests to create Equity, an app that helps users plan and announce protests such as the ones she frequented. 

To continue making the financial aid application more accessible, the Mos team turned to social media. They saw immediate growth on TikTok when they began publishing informational financial aid videos. Students who lacked easy-to-understand breakdowns of the financial aid process now had this information at their fingertips. In order to provide young people with more of the well-received content, Mos launched a learning center, which includes advice for students such as “Top 6 Tips for Creating a Budget for College” and “How to pay for college” as well as answers to financial questions such as “How does financial aid work?” and “Do student loans affect my credit score?”

What Mos has been able to accomplish can be traced to the core belief the Mos team shares: everyone deserves the opportunity to receive a quality education. “They wake up motivated by the mission every day,” Amira says of the team. “I love that most of them would have never been friends if they were not at Mos. They're very different personalities. I think about them like a symphony. You look at the instruments and they sound different. They're [making] different noises, and [the] people behind them are different and all of that, and magically it makes a beautiful sound together. We’re not one team of cellos or violins, we’re a little bit of everything.”

STORY ANA SOFIA ERATH
COVER GRAPHIC JANICE KIM