Staff

Larry Reed is the director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign.  He has worked for more than 25 years in designing, supporting and leading activities and organizations that empower poor people to transform their lives and their communities.  For most of that time Reed worked with Opportunity International, including five years as their Africa Regional Director and eight years as the first CEO of the Opportunity International Network.

During his time with Opportunity, Larry helped to implement a strategy for developing full-service banks that served the very poor while mobilizing hundreds of millions of dollars in savings deposits and investments.  Under his leadership, Opportunity developed the first microinsurance brokerage, which now serves hundreds of millions of people around the world. 

Reed has taught at the Boulder Institute of Microfinance for 15 years, served as the chair of the SEEP Network, and consulted with industry-wide initiatives like the Smart Campaign for Client Protection and MicroFinance Transparency.

Larry authored the State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2011 and has contributed to several books on finance and the poor including “The New World of Microfinance” (Rhyne, Otero, et. al., 1996), “Serving with the Poor in Africa” (Yamamori, Myers,  Bediako and Reed, 1996), “Globalization and the Kingdom of God” (Goudzwaard, 2001) and “More Pathways Out of Poverty” (Harris et. al., 2006). 

He is a graduate of Wheaton College and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Dr. D.S.K.Rao joined the Microcredit Summit Campaign (MCS) in July, 2000, as the Asia Organiser. He lives in Hydearabad, India. In the initial years of his work with the Campaign, he traveled extensively in Asia interacting with microfinance practitioners. MCS draws heavily on his wide experience and familiarity with the sector while organizing the regional and global summits.

Dr. Rao is a certified trainer of Cashpor House Index (CHI) and Participatory Wealth Ranking (PWR), the two efficient and cost-effective targeting tools. He has conducted scores of workshops and trainings on these two tools for practitioners in Asia.

He was closely associated with the National Surveys in Bangladesh and India during 2008-10, for measuring and tracking the poverty levels of microfinance clients, using the Progress Out Of Poverty Index (PPI).
Dr. Rao is presently implementing a Johnson and Johnson funded project for integrating health with microfinance in India, in collaboration with Freedom From Hunger.

He has co-authored two books on microfinance, titled, “The New Middlewomen” and “Development, Divinity and Dharma.”

Lisa Marie Laegreid is Deputy Director of the Microcredit Summit Campaign. In this role, she oversees the production of the annual State of the Campaign Report; the organization of regional and global summits; the provision of trainings on poverty measurement tools, on integrating health education with microfinance, along with other critical issues.  Lisa also oversees the advocacy and media outreach efforts to help bring the Campaign’s work to the general public.

Lisa has over nine years of experience in international development project management, including with Worldview International Foundation in Sri Lanka, with the Education Development Center, and with The QED Group LLC where she worked on two contracts for USAID’s Microenterprise Development office. Lisa is fluently trilingual in English, Spanish and Norwegian and she holds an MA in Philosophy. 

JD Bergeron has worked in microfinance for six years, most recently as Senior Director of Social Performance at Kiva.org. He developed and executed Kiva’s social performance strategy, completed 100+ social audits at partner MFIs, and created a scorecard and Social Performance Badges (www.kiva.org/about/socialperformance). Previously, he led the growth of the Kiva Fellows Program. Bergeron brings over 16 years of leadership and program development experience both in the corporate and not-for-profit sectors. Prior to Kiva, he worked at Acción, served with the U.S. Peace Corps in a poor, rural region of Bulgaria, and held senior roles at a variety of early stage companies during periods of rapid growth.

Bergeron holds a BA in Russian Language and Comparative Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis. He facilitates the Client Voice Task Force at the Smart Campaign and has been an active member of the Social Performance Task Force Working Groups for Social Investors and Universal Standards. He is also the co-founder of Bike Zambia (www.bikezambia.org), a not-for-profit event to raise money and awareness of HIV/AIDS and poverty in southern Africa. The inaugural ride leaves Lusaka on June 24th.

Sabina Rogers is Communications and Relationships Manager. In this role, she is responsible for the Campaign’s communications with our members and the broader field, for managing and finding new ways to engage and mobilize our Council members, and for providing project management and coordination support for the Microfinance and Health Integration project.

Previously (March 2010 to Dec 2011), Sabina was Program Manager of the State of the Campaign Report, managing the collection of Institutional Action Plans (IAP) and data analysis as well as the Report compilation, publication, and launch process. She supervised the annual call campaign in which Campaign staff target the top 500 microfinance institutions (MFIs) to submit their IAP—through which members report annual data on their client portfolio and outreach to the poorest.

Sabina has 10 years international development experience both in the field and home office. As a Senior Program Associate at the SEEP Network’s Member Services team, she made a direct impact on improving service to and increasing engagement of SEEP’s members and other practitioners through management of member-led working groups and the publications process. Work experience abroad includes leading community development and gender equity advocacy as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo and managing sports development and leadership training clinics for youth in Afghanistan with the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange. Sabina is bilingual in English and French and holds an MS in Development Management from the School of International Service at American University and a BA in History with a minor in French from the Johns Hopkins University.

Camille Rivera is the Senior Program Associate for the State of the Campaign Report (SOCR). She is in charge of liaising with microfinance institutions and networks around the world for the report’s data collection and data verification purposes, which are carried out through the submission of the Campaign’s Institutional Action Plan (IAP) forms. She manages the SOCR production and publication timeline, and updates the report’s methodology section and runs all data reports.  In addition, she carries out all outside data requests. At the 2011 Global Microcredit Summit in Valladolid, Spain, Camille handled all the plenary sessions, including the Summit’s opening and closing ceremonies.

Camille has worked closely with providing financial resources to women, working as a project evaluator with Fundo Angela Borba (now ELAS Fundo de Investimento Social), the only women’s fund in Brazil. There, she traveled throughout the country to facilitate a pilot program to implement an evaluation tool for the Women’s Funding Network, measuring the community impact of projects that focused on areas such as education, income generation, health, the environment, and information technology. In addition, Camille has worked on international exchange programs at the Academy for Educational Development, developing professional exchange projects for international visitors.  Other experience includes monitoring legislation in Puerto Rico and recruiting partners to create formal professional networks in Latin America and the Caribbean. Camille speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.  She holds a BA in International Relations from Brown University and an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Florida International University.

Jesse Marsden is the Research & Operations Manager for the Microcredit Summit Campaign.  In this role he is responsible for advancing the agenda toward reaching the Campaign’s second goal of helping 100 million families rise above the $1.25 a day threshold.  This includes building implementation partnerships, establishing research collaborations, designing and implementing the project plan, and recruiting grant support for the Campaign’s work to identify and promote the kinds of transformational practices that will help achieve the goal.  He is also responsible for tracking and overseeing much of the daily internal operations aspects of the Campaign. 

Jesse brings five years of experience in working on major advocacy campaigns and events on issues such as hunger and poverty alleviation, emergency response and U.S. immigration reform.  Graduating with an MA in International Affairs, he focused on peace and conflict resolution and international development at American University’s School of International Service.  His thesis focused on developing entrepreneurship in ecotourism within resource-constricted areas of Central America.  He is also co-author on an article on the path-wise development of new businesses in emerging regions of southern Mexico.

Fabiola Díaz is Events Manager at the Microcredit Summit Campaign (MCS). In this role, she is responsible for the planning, organization and management of the Campaign’s global and regional Summits in close collaboration with the MCS Director and Deputy Director.

Fabiola was part of the organizing team of our 2011 Global Microcredit Summit managing the Spain focused mini-plenary sessions, the training sessions called Day-long Courses, the Associated Sessions organized by delegates, the benefits for our sponsors, as well as the CGAP Photo Exhibitions in Madrid and Valladolid. In 2010, Fabiola was the Scholarship and Associated Sessions Coordinator for the Africa-Middle East Microcredit Summit (AMERMS) held in Nairobi, Kenya. She worked in coordination with our partner organization, the Association of Microfinance Institutions of Kenya (AMFI) to complete logistical and program-related preparations for AMERMS.

Before joining the Campaign, Fabiola gained experience in the international development field through her internships in international organizations and multilateral institutions like the United Nations Millennium Campaign and the Andean Development Corporation. She holds a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Economics and Latin American Studies from the University of Cologne, Germany. Fabiola speaks Spanish, German, and English fluently, and is proficient in Portuguese.

Bridget Dougherty is the Program Associate for the Seal of Excellence for Poverty Outreach and Transformation in Microfinance.  In this role, Bridget is working with Campaign leadership and industry stakeholders to develop and implement the Seal of Excellence Initiative.

Before joining the Campaign, Bridget was the Executive Operations Manager at a nonprofit organization in Hanoi, Vietnam that worked to promote economic development in sectors that had strong market inclusion for the poor and positive global growth prospects.  Bridget’s responsibilities in this position included operations, program management and reporting to stakeholders. She also developed the organization’s results management system to comply with the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development Results Measurement Standard.

Bridget consulted for three years at Accenture Development Partnerships and Accenture, where she project managed and deployed large-scale system implementations for Fortune 100 and 500 corporations. She holds a BA in Economics and Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.