When Kimsru Duth was a child, her mother moved her family from rural Cambodia to the capital, Phnom Penh, in the hope of sending her daughter to college. She took two grueling jobs, working days as a waitress and nights doing laundry, but she still couldn't afford Duth's education.
All that changed when Duth received a full scholarship to the Asian University for Women, a liberal arts college founded in 2008 in Chittagong, Bangladesh, with the mission of providing high-quality English education to young women from across Asia.
Duth eventually came to Japan in 2013 to help Kathy Matsui, co-head of Asian investment research at Goldman Sachs, sell Japanese businesses on an unusual investment opportunity — women's education.