Fellows

The Center’s fellowship program brings together leading industry and business professionals, social entrepreneurs, and academics to engage in Center work. Fellows are the intellectual leaders of projects within each of the Center’s program areas. These professionals advise program areas, develop new projects or programs, and conduct senior-level research. They are responsible for producing the outcomes for their respective projects.

Paul Rippey, Senior Fellow, Energy Links

Paul Rippey is a microfinance specialist and climate change activist with twenty years of experience in Africa. He has managed microfinance institutions in Burkina Faso and Guinea (Conakry) and is the co-founder of Association Al Amana in Morocco, which over ten years became the largest MFI in North Africa, with a portfolio of $230,000,000 and 400,000 customers. From 2002 to 2007, he managed the United Kingdom Department for International Development's Financial Sector Deepening Project in Uganda, rolling out programs of consumer education, savings-led informal groups, a "consolidation challenge fund," and massive demand and supply-side studies. In January 2007, he was trained by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to lead the climate-change presentation at the heart of the film An Inconvenient Truth and has delivered the presentation forty times in six countries throughout Africa and North America. Recent publications include “Preliminary Thoughts on the Implications of Global Climate Change for Microfinance,” written with Elisabeth Rhyne and appearing in The MicroBanking Bulletin, and a chapter of What's Wrong with Microfinance, edited by Thomas Dichter and Malcolm Harper.

As a senior fellow at the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International, he manages the Energy Links project, working to bring clean energy products to poor people in Africa and elsewhere.

> Listen to Paul Rippey's Energy Links Podcast Series.

 Heather Clark, Senior Fellow, Beyond Codes

Heather Clark has worked internationally for 20 years as a microfinance specialist and technical advisor to microfinance institutions, funding agencies, networks, and policy makers to increase the availability of quality financial services for poor and low-income people and their businesses. An economist by training, Heather has researched how financial markets evolve to bridge access gaps with quality services. Her contributions to the UNCDF “Blue Book,” Building Inclusive Financial Sectors for Development, centered on barriers to access for customers, retail institutions, and issues in consumer protection. Heather is a long-standing faculty member of the Boulder Institute and taught microfinance at Columbia University and American University. She recently worked as a consultant with CGAP on the Aid Effectiveness initiative, the Asian Development Bank Institute, and United Nations agencies. She is the former director of the United Nations Capital Development Fund’s Special Unit for Microfinance and served as USAID’s principal technical advisor in microfinance. She brings knowledge of microfinance in Asia, East Africa, and Latin America and has authored several publications on expanding access to financial services, including UNCDF’s Microfinance Distance Learning Course and When There Was No Money: Building ACLEDA Bank in Cambodia’s Evolving Financial Sector.

As a senior fellow at the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International, she manages the Beyond Codes project, an action research project dedicated to improving knowledge about consumer protection practices in the field.

> Listen to a podcast by Heather Clark on why she became a senior fellow with the Center and her work on the Beyond Codes project.