Joanna Ledgerwood, MBA'1986

After graduating from McGill University with an MBA in international finance, Joanna Ledgerwood took the expected path and joined one of Canada’s largest banks. Six years later she found herself in the private banking department helping wealthy clients manage large offshore portfolios. At the same time, she was taking night classes in women’s studies learning about the plight of poor women around the world. Finding it very hard to reconcile inequities between the rich and the poor, she eventually left the ivory tower of banking behind, finding her passion sitting in rural villages talking to women about how they juggle many competing demands with very few resources. At the time—1994—microcredit was just beginning and within a year, Joanna found herself with Nobel Laureate, Mohammed Yunus in Bangladesh, discussing how financial services can help poor women rise out of poverty. At a time when most microcredit practitioners were anthropologists and aid workers, Joanna’s financial skills provided a much-needed connection with the fundamentals of finance. Applying what she learned at McGill and from her years as a banker, she set about helping the poor to help themselves. In the process, she has become a world leader in microfinance and other strategies for poverty alleviation.

After working with a number of organizations in Asia and Africa, Joanna joined the Sustainable Banking for the Poor project at the World Bank and in 1998, wrote the Microfinance Handbook. She then moved to the Philippines to work with rural banks to deepen their outreach to the poor. This was followed by six years in Uganda supporting microcredit organizations to transform to deposit-taking institutions recognizing that the poor can not only borrow but can also benefit from saving services. In 2006 Joanna joined the Aga Khan Foundation in Geneva and led its access to finance activities around the world, working in a variety of fascinating yet diverse countries such as Afghanistan and Syria. In May 2013 she moved to Zambia to establish Financial Sector Deepening Zambia working with both public and private sector partners to promote enduring and sustainable change that enable financial markets to better serve poor and disadvantaged populations.

Joanna has continued to write, publishing Transforming Microfinance with Victoria White in 2006 and the New Microfinance Handbook in 2013, both published by the World Bank. She is currently writing a book on financial market systems, moving beyond microfinance to broader financial sector development. She is currently ranked the World Bank’s most popular author of all-time with her three books consistently topping the Bank’s open knowledge repository of over 18,000 titles. Recently quoted by the Wall Street Journal, her work and her books have provided inspiration and technical knowledge to hundreds of thousands of people working on the front lines of poverty alleviation.

Joanna is married and the mother of two daughters.