“If I don’t do it, then who will?”
It’s the question that has accompanied Dr. Antigoni Komodiki throughout her life, and has only become more urgent and demanding as the years have drawn on. Cyprus, she is not shy to admit, has a few problems, but the biggest one is with talkers. People take positions of leadership without any evidence of the real work that should speak for the quality they can offer, and she has been watching it happen at every level of society.
Follow THE FUTURE on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and Telegram
But rather than accept it, she has spent her years demonstrating an alternative, especially running Junior Achievement Cyprus. She is now chairing the JA Europe board and is midway through a doctorate. On top of all the other responsibilities that come with her role as a CEO of JAC. “I am an optimist who does. A doer.”
Dr. Antigoni Komodiki is the Chief Executive Officer and board member of Junior Achievement Cyprus (JAC), the local chapter of JA Worldwide, the largest organisation promoting entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and workforce readiness among children and youth. She currently serves as Chair of the Board of Executives and as a Board Member of JA Europe. She has been named Woman of the Year 2023 in Innovation at the MF Awards and awarded the IVLP Community Impact Award in 2024 for her Young Female Leaders programme. Before taking on her role at JAC, she spent 17 years teaching in the Cypriot public school system.
Antigoni did not want to become a teacher. She had a dream of studying in the United States, but her family could not afford it. She tried to win a scholarship to a university in the United States, but it fell through. By the middle of her final year of high school, she was still grasping at straws as to how to realise the next chapter of her life. “I was very good in Economics, Accounting, and Mathematics. They were my passion,” she says. She had wanted to study something along those lines, perhaps become an actuary.
However, she was running out of time and, frankly, out of options; so, she followed the career path those around her were nudging her on: teaching. “[They believed] it was the best career for a woman. You finish at one o’clock, you go home, you take care of your kids.” She became a teacher. It was not what she wanted, but it made her a better person than any other career would have.
“Working with kids always makes you better. You see the real value in things. You see the substance.”
Teaching, in Antigoni’s definition, is not a profession. It is a role that holds so many others within it.
Teaching goes far beyond knowledge sharing. A teacher is also a psychologist for the children whose parents are absent, and the mother, sometimes, for the children who do not have one at home. It is the person who has to see behind the eyes and behind the words.
“If the teacher doesn’t notice, nobody will notice.” Even now in her role as a CEO, she still calls teaching the hardest profession.
After 17 years, Antigoni finally left the classroom. The public sector in Cyprus, she says, is not one where the person who does the work best progresses as they would in the private sector. “It’s who you know. It is who is supporting you.” The evaluation protocols are not objective, the promotion process is slow, and as a public employee, she was legally prevented from doing the other things she wanted to do alongside her teaching. Being someone who always liked to keep busy and was bursting with ideas, she reached a moment where she could no longer accept the restrictions.
She wanted to do something of her own. Antigoni had already been involved with Junior Achievement Cyprus (JAC) for years by then, having joined as a volunteer and mentor in 2015 after seeing the impact of its entrepreneurship programme on her own students, and starting to work in a part-time capacity in 2017 while still teaching. She resigned from her teaching post in January 2019 and took the CEO role at JA Cyprus the following month. Antigoni has been running the organisation ever since. It has been, she says, the education of her life.
Junior Achievement, she explains, is a model for what schools ought to be. The program promotes experiential rather than lecture-style learning, competitions, and real-life engagement with the community, businesses, and civil society. When she saw the impact of Junior Achievement’s entrepreneurship programme on her own students in 2015, back when she was still teaching, she found a way to reconnect with her original love of finance through the work she had come to love in the classroom. As the cliché goes, something just clicked.
In 2023, she was nominated for the US State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Programme in honour of the impact her work was having on the lives of the Cypriot youth and their community. She spent three weeks in the United States with 15 other women from around the world, visiting five states, meeting with government departments, universities, women’s centres, investors, startup ecosystems, and vulnerable communities. Antigoni still speaks about the trip with deep gratitude and a heart full of emotion. “It was the greatest gift anybody could give me.” Besides the new friendships, Antigoni took away from that experience a sense of what other countries were implementing for women, and how far Cyprus still is from any of it.
“You come back to Cyprus, and see where we are, and I’m laughing, but I should cry. We are last in Europe in the equality index,”
she says.
The trip did not just inspire her but left her feeling she had a great responsibility to uphold for the next generation of the island.
As she dug into the stats further, she was even more shocked. Women’s representation in the Cypriot parliament, she says, is half of what it was five years ago. Municipal representation is negligible, with only two or three women among the country’s mayors. When it comes to the parliament, women’s representation sits around 14%. But it’s the European Parliament that is the most shameful, with no women from Cyprus holding a seat. Business leadership, in her count, is 75 to 85 percent male. She has been advocating alongside the office of the Commissioner for Gender Equality and organisations like BPW for years. The numbers, she says, are going in the wrong direction. Her approach to activism has changed, though, as she advocates for more men to be part of the change.
“You cannot bring the change alone. You need men in this discussion. You need men to promote change.”
So, what is holding women back in Cyprus? Antigoni offers a very simple example. Something as ordinary as school closing times. Cypriot schools close at 1 pm, she says, which is unique in Europe. That means the mother, because of an underlying assumption by society, has to be there at 1 pm. The mother has to leave whatever else she is doing. When Antigoni herself left the public sector and began working normal hours until 5 pm, the reaction from people around her was shock and, not to mention, an air of judgement.
“What does your husband say that you are not there at the gates?”
She heard the question hundreds of times. In the beginning, she would try to defend herself. Now she saves her energy for things that will actually matter in the long run and for the people who genuinely want to see change for the greater good. The system is what needs to change, she says. The culture is harder still.
“You can change the system. But the culture, it takes lots of time. Hundreds of years to change the culture in certain things.”
What she wants for the next generation of Cypriot young people, particularly young women, is that they fight for what they believe in, especially for the good of their community. “I want young people to fight for social justice,” she says. For the migrants. For the unattended kids arriving alone in this country. For the vulnerable, the single parents, the excellent students without the financial capacity to follow their dreams.
“If you are strong, you need to fight for the others. Strong people raise others. They support others. You are not strong enough to make others feel more vulnerable.”
Dr. Antigoni Komodiki is a guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her reflections on teaching, why she believes the culture is harder to change than the system, and the work she is doing at JA Europe to empower teachers across the continent, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that influenced them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
Women Building Cyprus follows women whose lives and decisions are changing what this island can be.
A production of The Future Media.
