Student & Alumni focus
Interview by Torsten Röwekamp Vice-President, CEMS Alumni Association
CEMS alumna field report – Out in Africa CEMS Magazine spoke with Claudia Huber, an alumna looking to make a difference.
Q.
Tell us about your CEMS background and the beginnings of your working life.
A. I studied Business Administration and Economics at the
University of St. Gallen where I also enrolled in the CEMS programme. I did my term abroad at ESADE in Barcelona and graduated from the programme in early 2005. For the past six years, I have been working on financial sector development or access to finance, part of it more commonly known as microfinance. Currently, I work with GIZ, the German development agency, based in Frankfurt, on an initiative called Making Finance Work for Africa (www.mfw4a.org), a partnership to foster the development of inclusive financial sectors on the African continent.
Q. Did this move come from a particular personal or professional motivation? A. I have always been interested in travelling and exploring new countries, continents and cultures and have taken every possibility to do this since I have been at school and obviously during university. The huge difference in development and living conditions between countries and certainly also within countries has struck me, the latter especially when I did an exchange semester in Buenos Aires in 2003, followed by a volunteership in a home for street kids.
Back home and looking for a subject for my Master’s thesis, I started to read about social entrepreneurship, and sustainable and mostly profitable economic activity with a social benefit. Consequently, I became more and more interested in the conditions for successful inclusive economic development of a country, i. e. development that includes not only the better-off, but also lower and poorer economic classes. After graduating, I was lucky enough to be awarded a scholarship that helped me gain initial experience in the international development and cooperation sector. Having worked for about 2.5 years with CGAP, the World Bank's resource centre on inclusive finance, I decided to move into the field and work directly within a microfinance institution. I worked within the management teams of licensed microfinance banks in Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Managua (Nicaragua) for the past two years.
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