"Through the Center for Microfinance Leadership we try to teach principled visionary leadership so that participants can add value to the organizations that they are leading" -Women's World Banking's Mary Ellen Iskenderian at the BSR Conference 2011

Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women's World Banking, considers why the East African Safari Rally is the perfect event to race for change in order to bring awareness to women's microfinance.

WWB has been empowering women around the world for more than 30 years. We have been able to do so through generous donations from individuals like you. Your donation can help a woman like Sylvia, who took her first loan of $600 from WWB’s affiliate Uganda Finance Trust twelve years ago. She used the loan to open Queen’s Hair Beauty Salon, which is today a successful business. Sylvia believes that she is helping African women by increasing their self-esteem and by providing a venue for women to come to together to bond and discuss business.

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WWB CEO Mary Ellen Iskenderian participated in a lively panel discussion with Vikram Akula from SKS Microfinance and Muhammad Yunus from Grameen Bank at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. The special session on microfinance, Profiting from the Poor? A Discussion on Microfinance IPOs focused on the implications of commercializing microfinance institutions. The often heated debate positioned WWB both physically and philosophically between those who advocate for no capital markets involvement and those who believe that reaching scale is not possible without the capital markets. WWB continued to be a strong advocate for a balance between raising capital for greater scale and sustainability, while ensuring the mission to serve the poor, especially women remains central.

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Fresh out of business school, Mary Ellen Iskenderian went to work on Wall Street, where she learned the art of banking and made good money. But something was missing. "I thought, 'This is not what I’m here for,'" she says. She made a jump to the World Bank, where over 17 years she worked to stimulate the private sector in developing countries, in order to alleviate poverty. Now, as president and CEO of the New York-based Women’s World Banking (WWB), she oversees the provision of training and support services to microfinance institutions that serve more than 20 million people, mostly women.

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By Burton Bollag | Washington — What started as a few small loans by an economics professor in Bangladesh to help local laborers avoid unscrupulous, high-interest loan services has become a booming specialized banking business. The business, microfinance, refers to small loans to poor people who generally have no access to banks. Microfinance is widely credited with improving the lives of millions of families around the world. Read full article

The mainstream media, including the New York Times, has been arguing lately about the effectiveness of microfinance. Yet a stark reality remains: there are millions of poor, especially women, who are not employable for a host of social, cultural and other reasons. A regular paycheck is a distant, perhaps impossible dream for them. They must borrow where they can to grow their small businesses and provide for their families. Without the availability of microfinance, their only recourse is the local loan shark charging exorbitant rates.

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Two recent studies have sparked debates over the benefits of giving out small loans to the world's poor. Women's World Banking joins its peers ACCION International, FINCA, Grameen Foundation, Opportunity International and Unitus to share our collective experiences in the recently released statement, "Measuring the Impact of Microfinance: Our Perspective." In addition, WWB CEO Mary Ellen Iskenderian discusses the impact that access to financial independence has on a woman's self-worth and confidence in a Forbes.com article, How To Measure Microfinance's Social Impact.

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As a response to the blog article The Fetishization of Metrics, which appeared in Social Edge, on how best to measure social impact, WWB's VP for Global Resources and Communications, Sarita Gupta responds:

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Microfinance is best known around the world as a powerful mechanism for low-income women entrepreneurs to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. When women earn, everyone benefits—women focus on improving the lives of their children and families; women repay their loans; women tend to be more loyal customers and to take on greater financial responsibilities of the household. As a result of these dynamics, a majority of MFIs have women as their primary customer base and use “outreach to women” (i.e., percentage of women borrowers) as a proxy for the level of poverty alleviation.

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