To rejoice Girls’s World Banking’s forty fifth anniversary, we’re showcasing the voices of people from world wide who’ve formed and touched Girls’s World Banking journey since its inception in 1979 at Fee on the Standing of Girls to at present!
These are tales from throughout Girls’s World Banking’s attain from the ladies we serve and our clients, to allies and girls in management who’ve contributed to girls’s financial empowerment and monetary inclusion.
Muna Sukhtian has spent her profession turning challenges into alternatives, shaping lives by way of her unwavering dedication to social service. As Board Chair of Microfund for Girls (MFW) and a Board Member of Girls’s World Banking, her affect extends far past Jordan, empowering numerous girls to beat monetary limitations and obtain independence.
From her early profession in administration consulting in the US to managing her household’s pharmaceutical firm in Jordan, Muna has introduced a imaginative and prescient for sustainable growth to each function. Her tenure as Chief of Workers to Queen Rania Al Abdullah additional deepened her dedication to addressing poverty and inequality. But it surely was her function as Managing Director of MFW in 2008 that allowed her to totally notice her ardour for empowering girls by way of monetary inclusion.
“After I joined MFW, I used to be impressed by the dedication of the ladies constructing the establishment from the bottom up,” Muna displays.
MFW’s journey, which started as a Save the Kids initiative in 1994 earlier than turning into an unbiased not-for-profit firm by 1999, is a testomony to resilience. The early days had been marked by cultural resistance. “Girls initially got here to us in secret,” Muna remembers. “It was not culturally acceptable for a girl to take out a mortgage. Their husbands weren’t blissful about it and would come and say to us, ‘We’re going to take this mortgage, however please are you able to be certain nobody is aware of about it.’”
Regardless of these challenges, MFW steadily grew into Jordan’s largest nonprofit microfinance establishment underneath Muna’s management, using 700 workers and serving 150,000 purchasers—over 90% of them girls—throughout 62 branches. Over time, attitudes shifted. “It has grow to be widespread observe for males to ask for a mortgage too,” Muna notes. “That exhibits that modifications occur.”
MFW’s progressive method—lending to poor girls with out typical belongings—has issued over 816,000 loans with a compensation charge of 96%. This technique has garnered worldwide acclaim, together with the celebrated GIZ Award on the Sanabel Convention in 2014.
Muna’s management has ensured that MFW affords greater than monetary merchandise. Collaborating with Girls’s World Banking, MFW has launched packages like medical insurance tailor-made to girls’s wants. “Shoppers considerably elevated their monetary literacy, together with understanding the entire idea of insurance coverage,” Muna explains. “With this elevated literacy, we had been capable of pilot extra merchandise that required this talent.”
Past monetary empowerment, these packages have had a profound influence on girls’s confidence and family decision-making roles. Muna shares, “One consumer began with nothing, took out a small enterprise mortgage, and started promoting meals. She now runs her personal grocery store—all this in a troublesome financial setting. We’re at all times so proud to contribute to our purchasers’ success.”
Muna’s affect spans far past MFW. As Board Chair of MFW and Board Co-Chair of Girls’s World Banking (2016–2020), she oversaw the launch of initiatives just like the Management & Variety for Regulators Program and the Girls’s World Banking Capital Companions Fund. She can also be deeply concerned with the Crown Prince Basis, Queen Rania Instructor Academy, and the Abdul Hameed Shoman Basis, furthering her mission of making alternatives for underserved communities.
Reflecting on MFW’s broader mission, Muna says, “We exist as a result of we need to empower girls, and it’s identified all around the world that ladies are those with the best burden of economic challenges that come due to poverty.”
For Muna, the work is much from over.
“All my life, I’ve been involved in social service,” she shares. “I’ve a robust will to make issues occur.”
Her imaginative and prescient for MFW—to develop its attain and proceed empowering girls—stands as a testomony to the profound potential of economic inclusion in creating lasting change.
Girls’s World Banking is devoted to financial empowerment by way of monetary inclusion for the practically one billion girls on this planet with no or restricted entry to formal monetary companies. Utilizing our subtle market and shopper analysis, we flip insights into actual motion to design and advocate for coverage engagement, digital monetary options, office management packages, and gender lens investing.
As a part of our present technique, we’ve helped present 82 million girls in rising markets – focusing on 100 million by 2027 – entry and use of economic services and products which might be reworking girls’s lives, households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive progress globally.
Assist us attain the practically billion girls nonetheless excluded from the formal monetary system. Donate now.
