Expanding the Vision of Microfinance: A Replicable Model of a Way Forward in Africa with Dana Dakin :: Graduate Student Lunch Seminar :: Events :: Center for International Development at Harvard University (CID)

"Expanding the Vision of Microfinance: A Replicable Model of a Way Forward in Africa"

Speaker: Dana Dakin, Founder and President, WomensTrust, Inc.

Friday, 7 March 2008
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM, Lunch served
Perkins Room, 4th Floor, Rubenstein Building, HKS

Biography:

In 2003, to officially celebrate her sixtieth birthday and the beginning of the "return" phase of her life, Dana Dakin headed to Ghana with a list of bootstrapped names to "adopt" a village. On the initial trip she was taken to Pokuase, within the outside northern perimeter of the capital Accra, where she pitched the concept of microlending to small groups of women. She engendered enough interest to return in six months, with funding that came from the sale of her second car.

Today, WomensTrust in the village of Pokuase is thriving, with more than 400 women in the loan program and repayment rates consistently above 90 percent. Additional funding is directed toward such pressing needs as scholarships for girls, adult literacy and a pilot initiative to shore up local healthcare. The 501c(3) organization (with NGO status in Ghana) has become a viable community-based partnership approach to long-term social change: bottom-up, playing to the entrepreneurial drive that is alive and well in developing countries, with money going directly into the hands of the beneficiaries. The model is now being replicated by others.

Dana's career is in the investment business, where she has been a pioneer in marketing consulting to institutional investment firms, both on the trading side as well as for leading money management organizations. Her experience began on Wall Street with a research project at the NYSE that led to negotiated commissions. In 1971, she joined what became Callan Associates, a top pension consulting firm. With a five-year inside perspective on evaluating money managers, she formed Dakin Partners in 1976, the first firm to creatively package institutional investment organizations. She has worked on some of the great launches in the business, and has authored a summary of the essentials of investment marketing in Five for the Road, available at www.dakinpartners.com . She also co-produced the eight-part PBS series "Beyond Wall Street: The Art of Investing" with a companion book published by John Wiley.

She was educated at Scripps College, where she graduated with a B.A. in 1964. Her concentration was in international relations, with an honor's thesis on pan-Africanism. She was a member of the college's Board of Trustees for nine years, heading up the endowment's asset allocation as part of the Investment Committee. Other board commitments over the years have included Alumnae Resources in San Francisco, NH Writers' Project and the Women's Fund of New Hampshire. Her office is based in a converted volunteer fire house in Wilmot Flat, New Hampshire. It has been featured on HGTV and in Accent Magazine.