Malcolm Harper was educated at Oxford University, the Harvard Business School, and the University of Nairobi. He worked for nine years in a medium-sized household hardware manufacturing business in England, mainly in marketing. He then taught in Nairobi, from 1970 to 1974, before coming to Cranfield School of Management, where he was Professor of Enterprise Development. Since 1995, he has worked independently, mainly in India. He has published some twenty books and numerous articles on various aspects of self-employment, enterprise development, and micro-finance. His research and consultancy work has been supported by a wide range of national, international, and non-government development agencies.

He has advised and evaluated a number of enterprise development and micro-finance programmes and institutions in India and in East and West Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and Gulf area, South and South East Asia, as well as in the United Kingdom. He is Chairman of Basix Finance of Hyderabad, a leading ‘new generation’ micro-finance institution, and a Director of M-CRIL of New Delhi, the pioneer of micro-finance credit rating in Asia. He was also the founding Editor-in-chief of the journal Small Enterprise Development, and is a director and trustee of a number of other institutions, including, EDA (UK) Limited, APT Enterprise Development and Intermediate Technology Publications in the United Kingdom.

William (Bill) Maddocks is the coordinator of the Sustainable Microenterprise and Development Program at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute. Bill holds a master's degree in community economic development from New Hampshire College and a bachelor's degree from Southeastern Massachusetts University. For seven years, he was the director of the Microenterprise and Development Institute at the School of Community Economic Development at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) and operated training workshops in New Hampshire, New Hampshire, Tanzania, and South Africa. He also taught organizational management and microenterprise development at SNHU.

Bill is the past executive director and cofounder of the Community Economic Development Center of Southeastern Massachusetts; affiliate coordinator for Working Capital peer microlending program; and director of development and energy conservation for People Acting in Community Endeavors in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Bill has been an activist in peace, civil rights, environmental justice, anti-war, and labor movement struggles for more than thirty years and has served in a number of capacities, including as a board member on human service, social justice, economic development, grassroots, philanthropic, and public health–related organizations. He is a trainer and facilitator who has worked for diverse clients, including the towns of Hooksett, New Hampshire, and Peacedale, Rhode Island; Northern Essex Community College Community Institute for Business Education in Massachusetts; the National Community Development Credit Union Federation; the Indiana Community Action Association; and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.

Michael Swack is a professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has appointments at the Carsey Institute and at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics. At Carsey, he is working on building scale in the nonprofit community development sector, innovations in community development finance, microfinance, and new models of social enterprise. He manages two ongoing projects: the Financial Innovations Roundtable (in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston) and the Stonyfield Farm Entrepreneurship Institute (in collaboration with Stonyfield Farm Yogurt). He has over twenty-five years of experience in the fields of economic development, finance, and development banking.

Michael was the founder and former dean of the School of Community Economic Development (CED) at Southern New Hampshire University. He has been involved in the design, implementation, and management of a number community development lending and investment institutions both inside and outside the United States. He was the first chairman and served for seventeen years as a board member of the New Hampshire Community Development Finance Authority (CDFA), a state-chartered equity fund for community economic development ventures and projects. He is the founding president and a current board member of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund. He was a founding board member of the National Association of Community Development Loan Funds (now the Opportunity Finance Network), a trade association of Community Development Finance Institutions, and a current member of the Community Development Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Internationally, he has been involved in development finance and microfinance work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Michael has published in the areas of economic development and development finance. He received his doctorate degree from Columbia University, his master’s degree from Harvard University, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Guest Speakers

Wajiha Ahmed, Bankable Frontier Associates (invited)
Wajiha Ahmed is an Associate in BFA’s demand-side practice, working particularly in the management of financial diaries projects. She joins the firm from the World Bank, where she advised and worked with regional teams on the design and implementation of results-based financing projects. In particular, she focused on bottom-of-the-pyramid energy access pilots in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Prior to the World Bank, Wajiha worked as a consultant for the Aga Khan Foundation where she led field-based research on village savings groups in northern Pakistan. She has also led a microfinance market research study for the Kashf Foundation in Punjab, Pakistan.

Wajiha holds a master’s in development economics and business from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a bachelor’s from Boston College. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for EcoEnergyFinance, a non-profit social enterprise that brings clean energy to rural Pakistan.

Jeffrey Ashe, Independent Savings Group Consultant
Jeff, is an independent savings groups consultant and was the founder of Saving for Change (SfC) at Oxfam America which has grown to 570,000 Savings Group members in Mali, Senegal, Cambodia, El Salvador and Guatemala. SfC is designed based on research he carried out in Nepal, India and Zimbabwe. Jeff previously founded and led Working Capital which was for a time the largest microfinance institution in the USA and has consulted to microfinance projects in more than 30 countries. While at Acción International he directed the PISCES studies, the first worldwide study of microfinance and through that study introduced group lending to Acción in 1981 marking the start of the ramp up of Acción’s work in this field. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1960s he developed the Campesino Leadership Training program where PCVs and liberation theology priests and nuns helped insure that those who tilled the land received their just share. He also teaches microfinance at Columbia and Brandeis Universities.

Kristy Bohling, Bankable Frontier Associates (invited)
Kristy Bohling is an Associate at BFA leading and managing projects in the firm’s strategy and special projects practices. She focuses on alternative banking channel sustainability, customer strategy and marketing, and business strategy and operational planning. Kristy has consulted for telecommunications companies, banks, and financial sector donor organizations throughout Africa, as well as in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia.

More recently, Kristy’s work has concentrated on collaboratively developing organizations’ financial inclusion strategies to achieve financial and social targets set by executive management and financial backers. She also led product-focused consumer research to improve offerings to low-income women and worked as a strategic lead on the product re-launch and platform integration of an international MNO’s mobile banking network.

A former Peace Corps volunteer in Niger, Kristy completed her M.A. in international business and development economics at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and her B.A. in political science and history at the University of Notre Dame.

John Carroll, UNH Professor, Natural Resources (invited)
John E. Carroll is professor of environmental conservation in the department of natural resources at the University of New Hampshire. In three decades at UNH, he has taught and done research on national and international environmental policy, diplomacy, ethics, and values as they pertain to sustainable agriculture and food systems.

Marilinne Cooper, Women’s Rural Entrepreneurship Network (invited)
Marilinne Cooper, Executive Director, was the president of WREN's board of directors from 2000-2005, during which time she was a participant in the Women’s Self-Employment Project’s Fusion Management collaborative. A graduate of the Institute of Nonprofit Management, she brings directing, managerial, and marketing skills from her former employment in the corporate world. As the current director of WREN, she has refocused the organization's attention and energy on entrepreneurial training, engineering WREN's Bethlehem expansion project which included a farmers' market, a second facility for offices and incubator business spaces, as well as the launching of WREN’s successful Berlin Market and downtown office.

Charlie French, UNH Cooperative Extension (invited)
As a Community and Economic Development Specialist for UNH Cooperative Extension, Dr. French provides municipalities with planning assistance in the areas of land use, recreation, tourism, civic agriculture, community development, and economic development. From 1999 to 2001, he was an Economic Development Educator for the University of Illinois Extension, and from 1995 to 1997 he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Panama, where he taught conservation principles and sustainable agriculture techniques to school-age youth and to subsistence farmers. Charlie brings his applied experience into the classroom as a faculty member in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, where he teaches courses in community and economic development.

James Hokans, Bankable Frontier Associates (invited)
Jim is a Director of BFA, and leads the firm’s housing finance practice. He has undertaken numerous assignments primarily for international NGOs and commercial banks in the areas of both wholesale and retail finance with a special focus on housing microfinance, product development, market research and risk assessment.

James Hokans has over 25 years of international development experience managing housing, economic development and urban management programs primarily in Eastern, West and Southern Africa. He has also worked in India, Philippines and Indonesia and several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a resident chief technical advisor, he worked for seven years in South Africa and was instrumental in establishing a national wholesale finance facility investing in micro-finance institutions in that country.

Previously, he served as a policy advisor to the first minister of housing and local government in post-independence Namibia, and Mr. Hokans helped establish the Ford Foundation’s first Urban Poverty Program in Eastern and Southern Africa that invested in some of the first micro-finance institutions of that region. James Hokans received his M.Sc. in Economics and Public Policy from the London School of Economics (LSE) and his B.A. in history from Dartmouth College. He also holds a certificate in Project Management from the Business School at the University of Cape Town.

Luke Mahoney, Brookford Farm (invited)
Luke started working the soil with his two big hands in 1997 in an organic vegetable garden in Pennsylvania. Next he moved to a biodynamic/organic farm in Russia for five years, followed by a two-year dairy/field internship in Germany. Since 2007, he started together with Catarina and a lot of other support, Brookford Farm, an organic diversified dairy farm in the Seacoast of New Hampshire. Now his new task is to use all his skills and learned organic methods to let new soil be made in Canterbury, New Hampshire. He is currently responsible for the management of forty dairy cows, field cropping, and overseeing financial parts and building site of the farm.

Vinod Parmeshwar, Oxfam America
Vinod Parmeshwar is the Associate Director - Markets and Innovations at Oxfam America. He has significant expertise in program design, project management, team building, fundraising, and financial management. At Oxfam, he helped launch Saving for Change, an innovative microfinance program that reaches more than half a million people in five countries. He worked with Catholic Relief Services as the microfinance coordinator and helped spearhead the Self Help Group-Bank Linkage program. Prior to that, he worked with the Self Employed Women’s Association Bank where he developed the business plan for the Indian School of Microfinance for Women. He also managed a Personal Loans product for Citibank. He authored a chapter in “Financial Promise for the Poor,” and he has presented at major trade conferences including the Global Savings Forum organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in November 2010. Vinod is an adjunct faculty at Brandeis University in USA and has taught at Southern New Hampshire University’s Microenterprise Development Certificate in Africa. He has made presentations and trained people in microfinance in Bangladesh, Cambodia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Liberia, Macedonia, Mali, Peru, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States.

Drew Tulchin, Social Enterprise Associates
Andrew ‘Drew’ Tulchin is Managing Partner of Social Enterprise Associates, www.socialenterprise.net, a registered ‘B Corporation’, a firm specializing in enabling entities to ‘do well by doing good.’ He has contributed to one hundred business plans and dozens of market studies. His efforts in social, environmental, and community investing have mobilized more than $100 million for ‘triple bottom line’ returns. Consulting has taken him throughout the United States and to nearly forty countries worldwide, from (A)fghanistan to (Z)ambia. Current engagements include: Confluence Philanthropy’s initiative Native Green Loan Fund to capitalize a U.S. $10 million fund, with Future of Fish – increasing sustainably caught / harvested fish, a World Food Programme evaluation on private sector involvement, and a ‘green’ US MFI helping low income people save money through more energy efficient homes. Previously, he directed a U.S. microfinance institution, was a lender, and worked in telecommunications. As a Program Officer at Grameen Foundation, he was the staff lead of the Capital Markets Group, where he served as the point person on the first Blue Orchard Securitization of $78 million. Publications include Researcher for the book, Compelling Returns. As a Director at Prisma Microfinance, his co-authored business plan was a Global Social Venture Competition award winner. As a team, he then raised $1.2 million in private equity. Drew completed his M.B.A. at University of Washington and his B.A., cum laude, from Washington University.

Greg VanKirk, Community Enterprise Solutions (invited)
Greg Van Kirk is the co founder Community Enterprise Solutions and Social Entrepreneur Corps. He is an Ashoka Lemelson Fellow, Ashoka Globalizer, Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year (2012) and a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and the Ashoka Siemens Foundation “Community Impact Development Group”. He and his team is focused on expanding the reach and impact of their award winning “MicroConsignment Model” globally. He has served as an economic development consultant for organizations such as USAID, Chemonics, VisionSpring, Soros Foundation, Church World Service, IDB, Water For People and Fundacion Paraguaya. Greg also contributes time as “Social Entrepreneur in Residence” for universities and has recently worked with Columbia University, New York University, Indiana University, University of San Diego and Arizona State University. He is a senior advisor for AshokaU. He has taught courses in social entrepreneurship at Columbia University and NYU Wagner. Greg began working in rural small business development as a Guatemala Peace Corps volunteer in 2001. Greg worked in investment banking for five years before arriving in Guatemala. Two deals he led at UBS during this time won "Deal of the Year" honors from "Structured Finance International" magazine. Greg is a graduate of Miami University and currently lives with his family in New York City.

Yusi Wang Turell, Carsey Institute Center on Social Innovation and Finance
Yusi Wang Turell is the executive director for the Center on Social Innovation and Finance at the Carsey Institute, responsible for overseeing all Center programs and activities. Prior to joining the Carsey Institute in 2011, Yusi led new initiatives at Citizen Schools, a national network of volunteer-led apprenticeship programs for low-income middle school students. At Citizen Schools, she directed the design, growth, and evaluation of its national 8th Grade Academy and Alumni Services and chaired its Task Force on College and Career Readiness. Previously, Yusi worked as a strategy consultant at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Innovation, where she researched the application of complexity theory to business. She also has worked as a researcher at Harvard Business School and a civil engineer on Boston’s “Big Dig” transportation project. Yusi holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and a master’s degree in technology and innovation management from the University of Sussex (UK) through a Marshall Scholarship. Yusi lives with her family in Durham, New Hampshire, where she volunteers with the Town’s Economic Development Committee. She is a graduate of Leadership New Hampshire and LeadBoston.

Chuck Waterfield, Microfinance Transparency