Meet Michaela Walsh, Women’s World Banking Founding President

Michaela Walsh tells me that at the age of seven, she was convinced she would never marry. She would grow up, have twins, and become a nurse.

She never married, she didn’t have children, and instead of becoming a nurse, she built a career based on the economic empowerment of women.

Walsh, who helped found Women’s World Banking (WWB) in 1979, took her life cues from the social awareness of her liberal father, who had cut his teeth during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era of world improvement. Walsh worked in an orphanage as a young teenager, and to this day can recall a sharp image of day workers toiling in the inner city of her hometown, Kansas City, Missouri.

“Because of my father’s views, I always wanted to try to make the world better than it is,” Walsh reminisces.

Through Women’s World Banking, Walsh’s mission for the past several decades has been to economically empower women. WWB helps support and organize women-led banks and financial institutions, which in turn offer direct services to some of the world’s poorest women. So thanks to WWB, these women are able to build businesses and assets, improve living conditions, gain a political voice, and better provide for their families.

WWB has affiliates in countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. The women-led affiliates have provided financial services to the tune of $18.5 billion in direct credit to more than eighteen million poor people around the world.

Walsh is very clear: WWB does not give low-income women the opportunity to make a little bit of money on their enterprises while the wealthy cash in on their cute ventures.

“It goes way beyond giving them sweet little micro loans,” she tells me. “It’s a whole network of women-owned businesses linked to all women at all levels. All decisions are made by women.”

This is an important detail for Walsh, whose career has spanned several “firsts” for women: she was the first woman partner of Boettcher & Company and the first woman manager of Merrill Lynch International.

She weaves a story about her heady days attending night school at Manhattan’s Hunter College. She says it was “just a totally diverse place.” There she took Shakespeare from a woman who had had babies at age thirty-seven and thirty-eight—an unusual story for the 1950s. Even more stunning at the time, Walsh points out, was the fact that the professor’s husband would come and sit in on his wife’s classes.

Walsh continued to encounter the evolving role of women. When Merrill Lynch opened an office in Beirut, Lebanon in 1960, Walsh volunteered to relocate and help run operations. The domestic Merrill Lynch office said it would be too dangerous for a woman to venture to Lebanon, so Walsh quit her job and applied for the position with Merrill Lynch International. They didn’t turn her down.

“When I got off the airplane, I felt like I walked into a cloud of passion,” she says of Beirut. “It was like Paris of the Middle East at the time. I learned how to play and work with people from all over the world, and it taught me how to live as a global citizen.”

She later transferred from Beirut to London, where she helped open up British financial markets to international firms. Back in New York, she worked for one of the first hedge funds, and eventually for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is where she first hatched the idea that she could get real resources to women by helping to set up women-run banks and financial institutions.

Now, Walsh is Director of Community Leadership and the Global Student Leadership Institute at Manhattanville College in New York City. She is an Honorary Board Member for Life at WWB, and is still closely involved with its daily work.

I didn’t need to pry much to find out about two of her most proud examples of WWB’s accomplishments: The Kenya Women Finance Trust, started by the first African woman to be made a vice president of Barclay’s Bank, helps women set up savings accounts for their children; and ADOPEM, a woman-owned and operated bank located in the Dominican Republic, gives consumer and housing loans and credits for families with micro enterprises, among other offerings.

The economic empowerment of women is important for a multitude of reasons, of course, but Walsh concentrates on a couple. She tells me women are better networkers—and they pour 90 percent of what they earn back into their families, while men invest about 50 percent of their earnings in self-indulgence, and plunk the leftovers toward their families.

As globalization becomes ubiquitous, Walsh is worried about how women in developed countries “help” those in developing countries.

“My biggest concern now, as I look back over a forty-year career in development, is that as we all go forward, we share more equitably,” she says. “Not through charity, but by building new business opportunities.”

To support women entrepreneurs in some of the poorest countries around the world, visit WWB.