Team of Experts

Betty Wilkinson

Ms. Wilkinson is an award-winning leader in financial markets and policy, SMEs, gender, and inclusive growth, with a lifetime commitment to poverty reduction, gender equity, conservation, and social inclusion worldwide. She has worked for over thirty years in multiple developing countries building, managing, and graduating high-performance multinational teams to produce innovative, sustainable results in collaborative ways. Her professional experience worldwide includes in the Asian Development Bank as Director Public Management, Finance, and Trade in Central and West Asia, Associate Director at the IRIS Center at the University of Maryland leading multiple country programmes and ground-breaking research, and First Assistant Secretary of Finance and Planning in the Government of Papua New Guinea. Her graduate studies in Agricultural Finance at Cornell University followed a BA Honours in Business Economics at the University of California. She is currently Senior Advisor to Financial Sector Deepening Africa after six years as inaugural CEO; deputy chair of the WWF Zambia Advisory Board; and Transition Assistance Practice Group member for the Institute for Integrated Transitions in Barcelona. Ms. Wilkinson has enabled innovative and successful global policy reform, advocacy, and field project success in both the public and private sectors in on four continents. She speaks and writes globally on gender, collaboration, inclusive digital and market financial regulation and technology, SME informal to formal transition, and natural resource management. Her recent achievements include multiple financial innovations to achieve Sustainable Development Goal results across Africa; fully sustainable public-private partnership in weather-based index crop microinsurance for over 1 million smallholder farmers; Zambian Luapula chiefs provincial partnership in inclusive growth for over 1.4 million persons; radio soap opera for digital financial education, now in multiple languages being provided nationally to 18 million citizens; ground-breaking quantitative and qualitative gender in microenterprise and social norms research for inclusive finance; Covid-19 research and economic impact on women, rural families, smallholder farmers, and microenterprises; national digitisation of agricultural subsidies, school fees, and identity; and national financial education curriculum in grades 1-12 for 4.3 million children.