Joanna Ledgerwood joined CGAP in 2020 as part of CGAP’s gender team focusing on social norms affecting women’s financial inclusion and gender transformative solutions. Joanna has extensive experience in financial inclusion, market systems development, women’s economic empowerment, informal finance, policy and regulatory reform, and monitoring and results management. She has consulted for numerous development organizations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Access to Finance Rwanda, the SEEP Network, FSD Uganda, the Mastercard Foundation, the CDC Group, FSD Zambia, and CARE, among others.
Most recently, Joanna served as the founding director of Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Zambia from 2013 to 2016. Prior to this, she was head of Access to Finance for the Aga Khan Foundation based in Geneva responsible for programs in Africa, the Middle East, and Central/South Asia. From 2001-2005, she was deputy director on a MFI transformation and agriculture finance project in Uganda and from 1999 to 2001 on an SME finance and rural bank project in the Philippines. Prior to that she was a commercial banker in Canada.
Joanna has written numerous papers and books including the Microfinance Handbook (1998), Transforming MFIs (2003), and The New Microfinance Handbook (2013), which provides a detailed guide to making financial markets work for the poor. She is a director on boards and various advisory committees in the United States, Australia, Rwanda and Zambia.