Why LearnersMentors exists, in his own words.
Dear visitor,
Welcome to the platform, and thank you for your curiosity.
This platform represents a personal journey — one that I suspect echoes with colleagues across the globe. I came from a small village, in a small country, where educational resources were sparse and far from equitable. As I found my way and progressed through my career, I saw a great deal along that path: unequal chances, teaching repeated endlessly without adding real value, excellent mentors going unrecognised, eager learners who couldn’t find the opportunity, and others who had the opportunity but never took it.
It affected me, and it made me determined to play my part in shaping global education, and to improve it wherever I could. As a clinician, I’ve always believed that if I can teach someone, somewhere, a new skill, it might one day save a human life.
As a child, I was taught an old Arabic saying: that whoever teaches you even a single letter, you remain in their debt for the rest of your life. I have carried that belief with me ever since. I was shaped by every mentor I ever had — starting with my parents, my first and greatest, and continuing through every professional mentor who gave me their time along the way. That debt was never something I wanted to escape. It was something I wanted to honour, and to help others honour too.
A few years ago, I founded a gynaecology educational platform called GynaeFellow. It was well received, but we faced real challenges. Every time I tried to teach, the same frustrations came back: meetings on Zoom or Teams, surveys on Google Forms, exams somewhere else entirely, certificates made by hand, a recorded session with nowhere proper to live except a YouTube channel nobody could ever find again. Nothing talking to each other. Everything held together by patience.
With a great deal of goodwill, I managed to bring a few colleagues on board — to teach a lecture here, share a video there. But along the way, I noticed something else: mentors don’t all want the same thing. Revenue was rarely the biggest motivator. Time and expense were the real burden.
I’m so busy, I can barely keep my head above water — just get me a trainee, and I’ll deliver.
That’s the line I heard more than any other. Other colleagues cared most about recognition. Some simply wanted to build their academic profile.
In 2022, I was diagnosed with cancer. The months of treatment that followed tested me in ways no exam or career setback ever had — but they also gave me something I hadn’t expected: a chance to rediscover myself, and a far clearer sense of what truly mattered. It wasn’t the end of the world. If anything, it became a turning point — a shift in perspective that sharpened, rather than dimmed, my sense of purpose. What carried me through was the same thing that had always driven me: a belief that the work I was doing in education still mattered.
It also left me with a conviction I hadn’t fully named before, though I now believe it’s the deepest one I hold: that a life is measured by what it leaves behind — not wealth, not a name on a wall, but whatever small good keeps working long after we are no longer there to do it ourselves. That belief comes from something simple: a belief in humanity, and in what we owe each other while we’re here. Teaching is exactly that kind of good. It outlives the mentor.
That illness, and everything before it, made one thing clear to me: whatever I built next had to be fair, reachable, and sustainable — priced so a learner in a small village could stand on equal footing with one in a capital city, not priced out of it. That’s the same reason we’ve kept our pricing as low as we responsibly can: not as a business strategy, but because equity was the entire point, and a platform only the well-funded could afford would have betrayed the very reason I built it.
It also crystallised something about the mentors themselves — the very people that old saying taught me never to take for granted. They deserve far more attention than they typically get: easing the financial burden so many quietly carry, giving them the recognition their work deserves, and opening doors to networks and collaborations they’d never otherwise reach on their own. Too many excellent mentors hold back, not for lack of skill or will, but because the time they give to teaching is time others spend earning elsewhere. I wanted to build a space where that trade-off disappears. And somewhere along the way, I realised something simple: look after the mentor properly, and the learner gets the very best of them in return.
So we built LearnersMentors around exactly that — one place to teach, earn, collaborate, get recognised, and grow. Look after your own learners, colleagues, or society exactly as you do now, locally, on your own terms — while reaching out globally for the funding, sponsorship, or exposure your work deserves.
I didn’t build this alone, and I don’t want this letter to read as though I did. Along the way, this belief found others who carried it too — co-founders and colleagues who didn’t need much convincing, because they had already lived some version of the same frustrations, and who shared the same conviction: that mentors deserve to be looked after, and that education should belong to everyone, not just the fortunate few. They are as much a part of LearnersMentors as I am, and everything in this letter is as true of them as it is of me.
This wasn’t built by a committee. It grew from a shared belief, among people who had each lived the problem in their own way — and who have never forgotten an old lesson: that we remain in debt to those who teach us, and that the least we can do is look after them in return. Do that, and everyone learns better. Perhaps, in some small way, so does the world.
If any of this feels familiar — if you’ve ever given more than you were paid for, or believed that where someone is born shouldn’t decide what they’re allowed to learn — I’d be glad to have you join us. Together, we can help shape education, and the world it serves, into something fairer and better than we found it — and leave that behind for whoever comes next.
Moiad Al-Azam
Founder, LearnersMentors
