Chapter 1: The Power of the Underdog

 “In Tajikistan, if you leave to study abroad, you don’t come back. If you do return, people often assume you must have failed in the U.S.”

— Azizjon Azimi

However, no one considered Azimi a failure. 

New York University’s youngest graduate in the Class of 2016, Azimi was recognized as a Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneur. At age 20, he was admitted to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Harvard Kennedy School’s dual-degree MBA/MPP program as a recipient of the prestigious Knight-Hennessy scholarship. 

Underneath Azimi’s meteoric success lay an unshakeable belief that countless youth in Tajikistan could reach the same global heights, if granted the opportunities he had. After completing his undergraduate studies at NYU, Azimi chose to forgo a lucrative career on Wall Street to establish the educational not-for-profit TajRupt in Tajikistan, aiming to provide lower- and middle-income Tajik youth with horizon-expanding educational and extracurricular opportunities. After graduate school, Azimi again bucked conventional wisdom by returning to his home country to make its economic development the focus of his career. He wanted to demonstrate that Tajikistan could indeed be both a producer and a destination for world-class success.