Rihanna is friends with a former prime minister.

When she’s not running her fenty beauty or Savage X Fenty Lingerie line.

Rihanna shares her passion for promoting education in developing countries with her friend (former prime minister) Julia Gillard.

Julia Gillard helped to recruit Rihanna as an ambassador, after first chatting over a casual dinner in New York.

I first met Rihanna shortly before the Global Citizen conference [in New York, in September 2016], where I introduced a video of her on stage. I met her in the context of exploring whether or not she would want to become the global ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), a multi-lateral fund that supports school education in 67 developing countries. More than 20 countries are donors, so most of our money comes from foreign aid budgets, but unlike a lot of other development organisations, we didn’t have a system of ambassadors or any sort of celebrity endorsers until it was brought to our attention Rihanna was interested in doing some work to help the world, and her particular focus was education.