Keynote Speaker: Yeardley Smith, award-winning actor, novelist, and avid supporter of microfinance

Yeardley Smi

Yeardley Smith is an Emmy award-winning actor, novelist and playwright who is best known as the voice of Lisa Simpson on the Emmy award winning television series The Simpsons. She is passionate about microfinance. As a donor and volunteer, she is partnering with Grameen Foundation on a special initiative geared toward expanding microcredit and related services to those living on less than a dollar a day. Yeardley will share her perspectives and experiences visiting with women in Haiti, both pre- and post-earthquake and address the impact of microfinance.

Murugi Kenyatta: Executive Director, Foundation for Women

Murugi Kenyatta

Murugi serves as the Executive Director of Foundation for Women (FFW) in San Diego. Her position is key in the linking of member volunteers, internal staff, board members, stakeholders and local organizations. She is responsible for overseeing the organizational operations and program development. Murugi is committed to the Foundation’s mission of eliminating global poverty through microcredit. Born and raised in Kenya, Murugi knows firsthand the power and effectiveness of microcredit and brings her personal experience and passion to the mission. She has an extensive background in marketing and nonprofit management and brings 10 years of experience in project management, strategic planning and public relations. As the executive director, Murugi overseas the local microcredit programs and works closely with FFW’s funding partner ACCION to provide financial access and business support to microcredit clients in San Diego.

Terry Provance: Executive Director, Oikocredit USA

Terry Provance has been Executive Director of Oikocredit USA, in Washington, DC, since November, 2001. He is a member of the Investor Relations department of Oikocredit’s international office based in The Netherlands. Terry Provance is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Prior to joining Oikocredit, he pastored a local UCC congregation in Pittsburgh for 5 years and then administered an international program in the national Cleveland office for 10 years.

Terry has traveled extensively throughout the world visiting over 100 countries for peace, economic justice, disarmament and racial equality. He has worked for the National Council of Churches and the American Friends Service Committee. Terry received a Master of Divinity from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and an MA in Christian Social Ethics from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

Christopher A. Crane: President and CEO, EduLeap Inc.

Christopher A. Crane is the President and CEO of EduLeap Inc. which makes microfinance loans to Christian schools in Africa and Latin America. These schools charge $3-15 per month tuition and are sustainable. The schools repay their loans and the funds are then recycled to other schools to expand. Studies show that low-cost private schools provide a superior education to government schools where teachers are unionized, cannot be fired and often absent. Prior to founding EduLeap, Mr. Crane was President and CEO of Opportunity International which provides microfinance loans, savings, microinsurance and training to over two million people annually working their way out of poverty in the developing world. Clients in over 25 countries use these financial services to start or expand a business, provide for their families, create jobs for their neighbors and build a safety net for the future. Opportunity is the world’s largest Christian microfinance organization with 10,600 staff. Chris helped Opportunity raise over $260 million, enabling millions of people to work their way out of poverty. Grants from private individuals, foundations and corporations increased at a 30% compound annual growth rate during Crane’s tenure. During the same period, Opportunity’s client base grew from 370,000 to 1.5 million.

Opportunity International recruited Mr. Crane following the successful IPO and sale of his San Diego-based company, COMPS InfoSystems Inc., which he acquired in 1992. In the eight years he owned COMPS, he increased its sales force, reduced costs, and expanded the company into new markets. COMPS grew 20–30 percent annually. He raised two rounds of private equity as well as a bank financing and brought the company public in May of 1999. He sold the company in February 2000. He left it the largest commercial real estate sales electronic database publisher company in the United States. Chris is the author of Executive Influence: Impacting your Workplace for Christ. He was a member of the Young Presidents Organization from 1990 to 2002. He was named Ernst and Young’s and USA Today’s Entrepreneur of the Year in San Diego in 1999. He received the Bob Buford Half/Time Institute Achievement Award for 2009. Chris studied art and music at the University of Vienna, Austria for two years, was graduated from Boston College, summa cum laude, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Elisa Sabatini

Elisa Sabatini serves as the Executive Director for Via International. She is responsible for providing strategic direction, supervising staff, creating new programs, and securing resources for activities in Mexico, Guatemala, the United States and Canada. Program areas include family health, nutrition, micro-finance, sustainable agriculture, community organizing and development education. In 2003, the VolunTours “social business” joined the family of Via programs.

Elisa formerly served with World SHARE for fourteen years as the Regional Director for Latin America. She coordinated participatory processes to create an autonomous SHARE organization in Guatemala as well as develop self-funding food distribution in Mexico and a rural agricultural loan fund. In Mexico, the Compartamos (SHARE) program is now the largest micro finance initiative in Latin America. Elisa joined Los Niños in 1998. In 2009 Los Niños changed its name to Via International.

Peg Ross, SPHR

Peg Ross joined Grameen Foundation in August 2008 as director of the Human Capital Center (HCC). The HCC helps anti-poverty focused financial institutions strengthen their people practices and align them with overall business strategy. Peg has over 30 years of experience and served as the HR lead on microfinance teams in Bangladesh and Bhutan. Prior to joining Grameen Foundation, she was VP of HR at Fortune 500 industry leader Equity Office Properties Trust.

Peg has also held HR leadership positions in the legal, financial, and distribution industries, gaining additional international experience in Tokyo, Japan. Peg received her M.S. in Organization Development from Loyola University of Chicago and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is certified as a Senior Professional in Human Resources.

Academia Speakers

Craig McIntosh, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Economics

Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies

University of California, San Diego

McIntosh is a development economist whose work focuses on program evaluation. His main research interest is the design of institutions which promote the provision of financial services to micro-entrepreneurs. He has conducted field evaluations of innovative anti-poverty policies in Mexico, Guatemala, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania. He is currently working on research projects investigating how to boost savings among the poor, on whether schooling can be used as a tool to fight HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, and on mechanisms to improve the long-term viability of Fair Trade markets.

McIntosh is currently working on a variety of evaluation projects. In Guatemala, along with a team from UC Berkeley, USF, and Universidad Rafael Landivar he is analyzing the impact of information-sharing between lenders on credit market outcomes and economic mobility. Other randomized work includes the impact of the introduction of cell phones into agricultural communities in Rwanda (with the Grameen Technology Center), and a community-driven development project in Tanzania (with researchers from the World Bank). Non-experimental evaluation work has looked at the impact of bundling health insurance into microfinance in Uganda, and the impact of the U.S. Endangered Species act on the probability of species recovery.

Robert Gailey, Ph.D.

Director of the Center for International Development

Associate Professor of Business

Point Loma Nazarene University

Robert Gailey is the director of the Center for International Development and an associate professor of business at Point Loma Nazarene University (PLNU). Rob holds a B.A. in business administration from Eastern Nazarene College, a Master of Divinity degree from Nazarene Theological Seminary, and recently completed a Ph.D. in Leadership studies with a concentration in nonprofit management at the University of San Diego. Rob’s dissertation research focused on the role of social capital and household economic welfare among clients of a microfinance organization in South Africa. Rob has lived and worked in Malawi for 18 months and served two years as research director for the Microcredit Summit Campaign in Washington D.C. He also served six years as director of Microfinance Consulting Services for World Relief. In addition to his role as director of the Center for International Development, Rob teaches nonprofit organizational management and theories of economic development in the International Development Studies major at PLNU and serves as the faculty advisor to PLNU’s Microfinance Club. Rob is married and has two children.

Chamu Sundaramurthy, Ph.D

Professor, Management

College of Business Administration

San Diego State University

Chamu Sundaramurthy is a professor of management at SDSU, specializing in strategic management, governance, and social enterprise. She is an active member of the Academy of Management and in 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2000 received the Academy’s Business Policy and Strategy Division’s Outstanding Reviewer Award. She was also elected to serve on the Division’s Research Committee (2002-2004). Before entering academic life, Chamu Sundaramurthy practiced corporate and taxation law in India. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and served on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati and University of Kentucky before joining SDSU in 2003. Her teaching interests are in the area of strategic management and international business. She has supervised a number of student field cases and one such project was awarded the Graduate Comprehensive Case of the Year Award in 1999-2000 by the Small Business Institute Directors’ Association.

Dr. Sundaramurthy’s research focuses on the interface between strategic management, entrepreneurship, and social enterprise. She is currently coordinating a research initiative in international social entrepreneurship at SDSU and is particularly interested in global social entrepreneurs in emerging markets, social enterprises, and the impact of these activities. Also of interest is the governance implication of scaling social entrepreneurial activities. She continues her research on family businesses, IPOs, and the governance of large public corporations which was published in leading journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, Journal of Management, Managerial and Decision Economics, Multinational Business Review, Business and Society, and Journal of Business Ethics among others.

University of San Diego

Stephen Conroy joined the faculty of the University of San Diego (USD) in the fall 2004 as an Associate Professor of Economics. Professor Conroy earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Southern California (1998), where he also received an M.A. in Economics (1995) and completed an NIA postdoctoral fellowship in 1999. Professor Conroy received his bachelor’s degree in Economics from Creighton University, where he graduated with honors in 1987. Dr. Conroy enjoys teaching graduate and undergraduate courses primarily in applied microeconomics. Among the graduate courses he has taught at USD are Microfinance and Wealth Creation (GSBA 594), Managerial Economics and Decision Making (GSBA 509), and International Business Practicum in Lima, Peru and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (GSBA 597). Undergraduate courses include Principles of Microeconomics (ECON 101 Honors and Non-Honors), Principles of Macroeconomics (ECON 102), Economic Development of Latin America (ECON 335) and Managerial Economics (ECON 373).

He has published over a dozen journal articles and book chapters in a variety of venues including in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Social Science Quarterly, Contemporary Economic Policy and Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences. Professor Conroy has won a number of teaching and research awards. In addition to his academic scholarship, Professor Conroy has also participated in a number of economic consulting projects for clients in the private and public sectors, especially in the area of valuation of nonmarket assets and economic base analysis. Professor Conroy has several years of business experience in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.

International Microfinance Panel:
Hear about the impact that the global economic meltdown is having upon the poor in developing countries and how different microfinance organizations are responding. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Rob Gailey, director of The Center For International Development at Point Loma Nazarene University, who has over 10 years of experience in the microfinance industry working at The Microcredit Summit Campaign and as the director of Microfinance Consulting Services at World Relief.
Panelists
Peg Ross – Grameen Foundation
Sean Carpentar – Project Concern International
Chris Crane – Eduleap
Elisa Sabitini – VIA International

Associate Professor of Economics