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Alumni Profiles Autumn 2007 |
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Lending to the Poor Leesa Wilson Shrader ’89 is a microfinance guru. She’s spent the last 15 years searching for new ways to extend financial products—primarily loans—to the world’s poorest. And for most of that time, as Shrader has worked for the United Nations, the World Bank, USAID, Women’s World Banking, and other organizations (including one she founded, the Russian Initiative for Self-Employment, or RISE), her field has enjoyed relative obscurity. That changed abruptly last year when Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Bangladesh-based microlender Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Shrader, who has an M.A. in public policy from Georgetown University, is taking the hoopla in stride—a rapid, purposeful stride, that is. At 41, the mother of two (ages five and six) has tales to tell: of a camel-hair blanket maker whose business she tried to help in St. Petersburg, and mixed-ethnicity bank boards she worked with in the Balkans. Now, she’s riding the next wave of microbanking innovation. Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, with her husband, Hans (a development specialist with the International Finance Corporation), Shrader is trying to bring the power of commercial banks to bear on poor communities. Working as a consultant for Portland-based relief agency Mercy Corps, she’s been lobbying the Gates Foundation, Intel, and several international agencies to join in founding a new Indonesian commercial bank. Reed: What has it been like watching microlending become better known to the general public? At the same time, the sector is in total flux and I think some people are scared. In India, a gigantic commercial bank is channeling money through microfinance institutions to poor people; it’s allowed the bank to go from 400,000 poor clients to six million in four years. It’s good. It’ll allow those people to eventually join the formal financial sector. What people in microfinance are afraid of is that some day this big bank will come in and take over completely and these microlenders—community-based, reaching out to the poor—will be replaced by Big Daddy Bank. What are you aiming to do with this new commercial bank you’re involved with in Indonesia? Was there anything about your Reed education that prepared you for microfinance? What switched you on to small money? |
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Autumn 2007 |