Understanding Women’s Rural Transition and Service Needs

Anne is the Mastercard Foundation Rural & Agricultural Finance Learning Lab's Learning Manager. She has extensive experience working with non-profit organizations, financial service providers and the private sector to develop and implement innovative financial inclusion interventions, with a specific focus on rural and agricultural finance. As Learning Manager, she oversees the Lab’s learning function, which aims to improve the way the Mastercard Foundation’s portfolio of rural & agricultural programs ($180M+), operating across 20+ markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, capture and synthesize insights from their initiatives. She regularly publishes insights from the Lab's portfolio on raflearning.org and via other media outlets, and is co-author of the "Pathways to Prosperity: Understanding Women’s Rural Transitions & Service Needs" report.

Jasmin Hidanovic is a member of AgDevCo’s Smallholder Development Unit and West Africa team and plays a key role in the implementation of AgDevCo’s Gender Strategy. He has been involved with AgDevCo’s gender work for over four years, working closely with AgDevCo’s Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and Impact teams as well as external gender experts. He has helped to mainstream gender in AgDevCo’s investment process, contributed to the development of AgDevCo’s Gender Toolkit and focused on building gender capacity of staff. He has been involved in six deep-dive country gender studies, has led the development of AgDevCo’s gender publications, contributed to policy guidance on empowering women in agriculture at the Rome-based agencies (FAO, WFP, IFAD) and he is the AgDevCo delegate to the Gender-Smart Investing Summit 2020. He is a graduate from the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, with an MSc in Finance & Investments and BSc in International Business Administration and he is pursuing the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation.

Katie Naeve is Director of Impact and Partnerships and Lead of the Women in Agricultural Initiative at Root Capital. She oversees the organization’s impact measurement and management team and its global gender inclusion strategy and programming. For over a decade, Katie has worked at the intersection of international development programs and policies and impact measurement, largely focusing on agriculture and women’s economic empowerment. Prior to joining Root Capital, Katie conducted and oversaw evaluations of an array of international development projects around the globe at Harvard and Mathematica Policy Research, including studies on the impact of microfinance on women entrepreneurs in India, and efforts to reduce child labor and create viable employment for women and girls in low-income countries. She also worked for Oxfam America on an agricultural finance and development initiative to build smallholder climate resilience in Africa, helped launch a social enterprise (Instiglio) focused on results-based financing, and helped developed the Gender Action Portal at Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program that translates rigorous research into actionable evidence for policymakers and practitioners.

Clara Colina is Program Manager for Mastercard Foundation’s Rural and Agricultural Finance Learning Lab. The RAF Learning Lab is Mastercard Foundation’s dedicated learning partner to its over $170 million financial inclusion portfolio in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Clara leads the Learning Lab independent research efforts and works closely with the portfolio partners to provide direct advisory business support. Clara has extensive experience supporting foundations, civil society organizations and corporations on strategic planning and business development to address the challenges and opportunities related to financial inclusion, finance for development, agriculture and food security, and ICT for development.
Prior to the Learning Lab, Clara was a Project Manager at Dalberg Advisors where she supported key players in the agriculture and financial inclusion space, including Mastercard Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation. Clara started her career at Bain & Company and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School where she specialized in Social Entrepreneurship and International Development.

Nisha Singh leads Social Norms working for FinEquity. Her work focuses on increasing economic opportunities for women through innovations in programming and use of technology. She recently wrapped up a peer learning initiative on “Shifting Social Norms in the Economy at Scale.” Prior to that, she worked at The SEEP Network from 2008 to 2016 where she managed a portfolio of learning programs that focused on increasing economic opportunities for vulnerable populations. Nisha began her journey in development in 2002 in Hyderabad, India working on livelihood financing. Since then she has worked with a range of institutions from CBOs to multi-lateral donors, private sector actors and policy makers on promoting access to finance and market systems development