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SIPA Faculty
Mayada El-Zoghbi
International Affairs Building, 13th Floor
Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs
Phone: 212-854-3213
me32@columbia.edu
Biography:
Mayada El-Zoghbi holds a Master's of International Affairs from Columbia University and a BS in Business from the University of Minnesota. She is a founding partner of Banyan Global, a consulting firm in New York focused on private sector enterprise development. Prior to forming Banyan Global in 2002, she founded and managed several financially viable microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the Balkans (Prizma in BiH and KEP in Kosovo) that provide financial intermediation and business development services to micro and small entrepreneurs.
In the past several years, Ms. El-Zoghbi has worked with a variety of donors and non-profits to support microfinance sectors in various regions of the world. She was one of the authors of a manual and trainer's guide for a course developed in partnership with the International Labor Organization and UNCHR supporting NGOs in war torn countries to transform their operations from subsidized aid programs to sustainable financial intermediaries. She was also a contributing author to a Citigroup Foundation funded initiative managed by the Foundation for Development Cooperation to develop curriculum and tools for MFI preparedness and rapid response after the Asian tsunami. She is currently the research director for the USAID Funded AMAP Knowledge Generation project on Microfinance Amid Conflict. In addition to her 4 year tenure managing MFIs in the Balkans, Ms. El-Zoghbi has worked in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, and the West Bank/Gaza.
Her technical areas of focus include training, market research, impact research, business planning and financial modeling, sector studies, national policy frameworks, institutional assessments and evaluations. She has worked extensively with CGAP, IFC, World Bank, UNCDF, USAID as well as many non-profits supporting microfinance and enterprise development activities.