FROM a short-term study abroad course about economic development in Bangladesh TO Working as CEO of AB Bank Rwanda, which is focused on supporting small farmers
When Zach Raymond ’09 stepped into his current role in September 2022, he found a huge opportunity: The agriculture sector accounts for almost 70 percent of Rwanda’s economy, but banks rarely worked with the individual farmers who are the primary economic drivers: “Their farms are far distances from towns. They’re very, very tiny. The kind of credit they need is super small,” says Raymond, who was an international studies major at Muhlenberg. “There’s never been a means of providing credit to all these people who are really the bulk of the economy here.”
That’s the primary challenge he’s tackled as CEO. The bank has been working with community leaders to extend its reach into farming communities and finding ways to efficiently and effectively work with very small clients. His interest in the small business finance space began back in 2009, when he took the Muhlenberg Integrative Learning Abroad (MILA) course Climate Change & Sustainable Development in Bangladesh with Professors of Political Science Jack Gambino and Mohsin Hashim.
“Going to Bangladesh was such an eye-opening experience,” he says. One purpose of the trip was to witness the impact of climate change on people’s lives, but the group also met with nonprofits focused on poverty alleviation. Raymond had taken economics courses but hadn’t seen the concepts applied this way: “I learned about and saw firsthand different nonprofit lending approaches to stimulate economic development and livelihood development.”
He worked on Wall Street for a few years after graduation, but the goal was always to land somewhere more like the nonprofits he’d encountered on his MILA trip. He found an internship opportunity in South Africa with the Small Enterprise Foundation, a nonprofit microfinance organization, and made the move. He ultimately spent almost eight years there in a variety of roles before he was ready for a new challenge.
“The most rewarding part is seeing the way some of our clients’ businesses grow from really, really tiny and basic businesses to larger enterprises that are supporting more people directly and indirectly.”
—Zach Raymond ’09
Raymond (at left) with Steve Epting ’09, Jed Reiff ’10 and Matt Balaban ’10 at a park near the Bangabandhu Bridge on the Jamuna River north of Dhaka, Bangladesh, during the MILA trip. Photo by Jack Gambino
“I had a feeling I could make a transition to a still development-focused but for-profit, private sector microfinance organization,” he says. He found a role at AccessBank Tanzania, which had an ownership group committed to development. He was hired there to help solve some major problems the bank was having; once those were resolved, he made the move to AB Bank Rwanda, which has the same ownership.
“The most rewarding part is seeing the way some of our clients’ businesses grow from really, really tiny and basic businesses to larger enterprises that are supporting more people directly and indirectly,” he says. “To see that, it’s inspiring.”
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