Skollar 2006/07
Prior to Oxford, Ntongi McFadyen spent eight years with Save the Children, specialising in financial and business support services for poor entrepreneurs around the world. She spent three years in Guatemala to start-up and manage a rural microfinance program for Mayan women. The programme was selected as a finalist for the World Bank's 2003 Development Marketplace competition for "making services work for poor people." Later, she built the capacity of microfinance institutions across Africa, Central America, and South Asia, and developed strategic alliances with commercial banks and NGOs to bridge the delivery of social services with access to finance.
Ntongi decided to do an MBA in order to improve her understanding of how businesses start-up, grow, and mature, and how to identify their needs at each stage. The Skoll Scholarship appealed to her because she wanted to learn how to bridge the gap between development assistance, social finance, and the private sector. During the programme, she found it rewarding to engage in discussions with other Skoll Scholars and with the broader MBA class about social entrepreneurship and the opportunities for business to contribute to social change. “I'm inspired when I see a former MBA colleague that came from years in the international bond market now working with a microfinance investment fund in Africa,” she says.
Since completing the MBA in 2007, Ntongi has continued to work to improve entrepreneurs’ access to markets, financial services, and technology. She started an independent consultancy to provide advisory and project management services to public and private sector clients seeking to apply entrepreneurial approaches to solving economic development challenges. In this capacity, she is currently involved in projects with ShoreBank International, Save the Children, the US Agency for International Development, and AT&T. She has worked to develop opportunities for local banks to increase their lending to micro, small and medium business in remote and politically unstable regions of Pakistan and is leading the development of new investment strategies to expand agricultural credit and insurance to small holder farmers in Mali.
Ntongi has also been working to bring web 2.0 and mobile technology to the development community to promote real-time information exchange and coordinated action. Her exploration of new technologies began at Oxford where she worked side-by-side with tech savvy peers to find new ways these applications could be deployed to solve development challenges.