Learning from Practitioners on the CGAP Board

During our May 2014 Annual Meeting in Peru, the CGAP Council of Governors elected three new, at-large industry members to the CGAP Executive Committee (ExCom), which functions as CGAP’s de facto Board. Enlisting industry members to serve on our Board with member oversight roles and learning from their experiences are hallmarks of CGAP’s governance structure. In a 2012 independent review of the governance structure of similar, albeit at times much larger Global Partnership Programs, the reviewers highlighted the small working structure of CGAP’s ExCom and praised it as noteworthy in its “solidly technical and professional membership.”

CGAP has a total of 11 ExCom members who represent geographic diversity from three continents as well as expertise ranging from base-of-the pyramid banking, to technology start-ups, to emerging market policy making.

Daphne Motsepe joined CGAP’s ExCom in 2014. She had been a commercial banker in Africa with experience in small business finance, agent banking, and rural finance. In the 1990s, she was appointed by President Mandela as Deputy Chair of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Rural Finance. Subsequently, Daphne was instrumental in building the financial inclusion portfolio of initiatives for Absa, the largest consumer bank in South Africa and one of the largest banks in Africa. She recently retired from Absa Bank, where she was Chief Executive of Unsecured Lending. During her time at Absa, she started a microenterprise lending unit and a consumer credit union, and later became the head of Absa Small Business.

Muna Sukhtian, the first of the three new at-large ExCom members, is the Managing Director of Microfund for Women, a leading microfinance institution in Jordan. She is also a Director of GMS Holdings, a family-owned diversified company. Muna started her career as a management consultant in the U.S. before returning to Jordan to work in her family’s multinational pharmaceutical business. She was Chief of Staff to Jordanian Queen Rania for nearly two years and recently completed a four-year term as a member of the Amman City Council.

Carolina Trivelli leads the Peruvian Banks Association’s electronic money initiative, which aims to create an interoperable platform for digital payments through the use of mobile phones and a channel to access financial services for the unbanked in Peru. From 2011 to 2013, she was Peru’s Minister of Development and Social Protection. Between 2008 and 2011, she co-managed Proyecto Capital, an initiative to link conditional cash transfer programs with financial inclusion strategies.

Nicholas Hughes is the Strategy Director and Founder of M-KOPA, a company that provides pay-as-you-go solar energy services in East Africa. He leads new product and new market activities for the firm. He was previously Managing Director of Signal Point Partners, the advisory and venture firm that started M-KOPA. Until 2009, Nick was Head of Global Payments at Vodafone Group, where he was one of the start-up founders of M-PESA in Kenya in 2004.

In addition to the four at-large members, the ExCom includes six representatives from CGAP’s member organizations, typically from technically relevant counterpart units, and the CGAP CEO as ex officio. The six representatives are Edvardas Bumsteinas, European Investment Bank; Anniken Esbensen, Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD); Margaret Grosh, World Bank; Michael Hamp, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD); Ann Miles, The MasterCard Foundation; and the ExCom chair Kazuto Tsuji, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).

The ExCom provides strategic guidance to CGAP on its five-year strategic framework and associated results framework. It recommends to the Council of Governors approval of the Operational Team annual workplan and budgets, and reviews implementation of the approved workplans and budgets and achievement of results. The ExCom also provides guidance to the Council of Governors on partnership governance issues.