The people who carry the desk up the mountain.
School Aid is run by a small board with long histories in education, safeguarding and field delivery — and one four-legged ambassador who has travelled more miles in the High Atlas Mountains than most. Every human CV is published in full.
David de Montaigne
Founder & Chair — field missions, partnerships, programme design
David founded School Aid MTÜ in 2024, chairs its Management Board, and funded the first deliveries personally. He is a British energy and project-finance leader with more than five decades of international experience.
Hired at eighteen by KCA in Libya, who sponsored his BSc in Petroleum Engineering at Benghazi, he was headhunted by Schlumberger in 1975 and became Director of North Sea Operations at twenty-nine, by a distance the youngest director in the Schlumberger Group. He founded Demon Cementing in Aberdeen, building a purpose-built offshore stimulation vessel for ADNOC, and used it to lead a leveraged buyout of Dolphin Fluids.
Between 1990 and 1992, through Kredit-Finanz A.G. in Liechtenstein, he directed project finance supporting Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Macedonia through their transition from command economies to open markets, work that preceded the EBRD and shapes School Aid cross-border delivery today.
He chairs the Board, safeguards the firewall between the charity and his commercial ventures, declares his interests and recuses himself from any related-party decision.
Maribeth Buo de Montaigne
Co-Founder — New Country Development & Community Relations
Maribeth opens new countries for School Aid. First-contact assessment, government and institutional liaison, partner vetting and host-community engagement all sit with her, across every programme we run. She is a Filipina community-development and government-relations leader with thirty years of experience across Southeast Asia, China and Australia.
As co-founder and President of Global Green Power, she led the regulatory campaign that secured all sixteen government permits and licences for a Philippine power platform, working end to end through the Department of Energy, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the Department of Agriculture and the Energy Regulatory Commission. She built the feedstock base directly with farming communities, irrigators associations, rice mills and sugarcane consortiums, securing 25-year supply contracts totalling 3.5 million tonnes.
She authored the Code of Business Ethics governing dealings with farmers and host communities, designed the Biomass Fair Pricing scheme, and created the SHARE community-benefit programme. She has been primary liaison to the Philippine Congress, Senate and Office of the President.
She is strongest at the opening of things: the first meetings, the first partners, the first agreements in a country where nobody has yet heard of you.
Nichola Jane de Montaigne
Education, Learning Systems, Capacity Building & Safeguarding Guidance
Nichola designs how the education response actually works. She is a developmental psychologist and educational leader with more than twenty years across international education in Portugal, China, Brazil and Norway, holding an MA in International Education and a BSc (Hons) in Developmental Psychology.
She was Founding Head of the primary division at Romerike International School in Norway, where she built teams, curriculum, culture and safeguarding policy from the ground up and chaired safeguarding and wellbeing. Before that she led primary curriculum design at St. Francis College in Brazil, and was Student Services Coordinator and Case Manager at Suzhou Singapore International School in China.
Underpinning that is front-line social work: youth reoffending, family counselling and art therapy in Hull and Portugal, supporting vulnerable and abused children from infancy to eighteen. It is why our safeguarding framework is built on practice rather than theory. She also spent two years in the Philippines working with farming communities, which informs our Philippine programme.
She provides safeguarding policy, training and frameworks, and designs adaptable learning systems for education under disruption. Implementation and incident response rest with in-country teams, partners and the Board.
Annabelle Buo Ramos-Hermoso
Education Quality Adviser — 30-year Master Teacher
Annabelle advises the Board on education quality. She is a career educator with three decades in Philippine public education, and the only person on the team whose working life has been spent entirely in a classroom.
She has taught at San Jose Elementary School in Makati since 1995, progressing from Teacher I to Master Teacher I, a senior Department of Education instructional-leadership rank. She serves as Grade Level Consultant for Grades II, IV and VI, acts as Officer-in-Charge in the School Head absence, and chairs school-improvement, advocacy and in-service training committees.
She has authored self-learning modules and a mathematics textbook, designed strategic intervention materials, and trained teachers for the Mathematics Teachers Association of the Philippines, which co-runs the national Metrobank-MTAP-DepEd Math Challenge. She facilitates the national early-literacy-and-numeracy training of trainers and has published action research.
She holds an MA in Education, has completed doctoral units, and is a licensed professional teacher. She is the sister of co-founder Maribeth de Montaigne; the relationship is disclosed openly, and as a career public-school educator she is independent of the founder’s commercial ventures.
Barclay de Montaigne
Chief Morale Officer — mascot and veteran of the missions in the High Atlas Mountains
Barclay has travelled more miles in the High Atlas Mountains than most of the team and is, by some distance, the most photographed member of it. He travels on missions, meets the children at every delivery, and has proved a reliable icebreaker in villages where a vehicle full of strangers would otherwise be treated with justified caution.
A board built for trust.
Material decisions are adopted by the Board through minuted resolutions. Related-party interests are disclosed, and the association is publicly and financially separate from any commercial ventures of its members.
The management board is recorded in the Estonian Business Register under code 80646408, which is public and free to check — it takes about a minute. The register currently shows one management board member: David de Montaigne, Founder and Chair. A resolution of 20 July 2026 appointed three further people to serve as members of the association, in the roles set out above. For transparency: two are connected to the founder’s for-profit companies and recuse themselves from related-party decisions, and Annabelle Buo Ramos-Hermoso is the sister of co-founder Maribeth Buo de Montaigne.