The Filipina Women’s Network (FWN) selected Maria Africa Beebe as one of the 100 Most Influential Filipina Women in the World (Global100)™ – for her professional work with Washington State University in shaping local and global interconnections in Afghanistan, Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, and more.

Maria Beebe has an M.A. in Social Science and a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University. Her research interests include critical discourse analysis, women’s leadership, and communication technologies (ICT) for development. Maria has over twenty years of experience in global development in higher education. Maria has lived and worked in South Africa, Liberia, the Philippines, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

Although retired in 2020, she launched Kaisipan, Inc. as a non-profit to advance the digital capabilities of educators in the Philippines. Maria is a consultant to co-create an Asia Open RAN Academy based in the Philippines that will eventually serve the Indo-Pacific. Maria and James have been married for 53 years and have two children, David and Ligaya, and four grands–Jaxon, River, Harry, and Rob.
Maria received the Top Hat award in 2020, the Continuing Influential Filipina Women in 2019, the Global FWN100™ 2013, and the U.S. FWN100™ 2011. Maria edited four Filipina Women’s Network (FWN) books about the leadership of Filipina women.

Maria Beebe and Aramid Consortium board member Imelda Parcasio have won the UNESCO Open Education Awards for their Florida, USA-based Kaisipan digital education project for teachers in the Philippines. Beebe and Parcasio were named recipients of the UNESCO Open Education Resources (OER) Implementation Award for Excellence for Kaisipan’s three-pronged approach in harmonizing learner-centered pedagogy, leveraged technologies such as OER, and humanizing education to help advance the digital capability of teachers.