Steering Committee of the Microinsurance Innovation Facility

Pauline Barrett-Reid, International Labour Organization

Pauline Barrett-Reid is Deputy Director of the Social Security Department of the ILO and is based in Geneva. She has particular responsibility for technical cooperation. She has worked in the field of social security for three decades and has worked for the ILO in Africa and the CIS. She has a Masters Degree from Brunel University in Public Administration, specializing in social security.

Donald G. Canning, Microsoft Corporation

Donald Canning is the worldwide industry manager of solutions of insurance for Microsoft Corp based in New York City. Canning is also currently acting worldwide managing director of the Insurance Services Group for Microsoft.

Canning is responsible for driving and managing Microsoft’s worldwide industry and vertical strategy and its execution for the insurance market. Specifically, Canning oversees the indus-try strategy, marketing, solution development, partner development, thought leadership, and executive relations, ensuring that the full extent of Microsoft’s vision and value proposition is realized by insurance institutions globally.

Canning has been with Microsoft for almost four years as an integral part of Microsoft’s worldwide Financial Services Group. Canning’s background is as a technology strategist within financial services specializing in business transformation around technology, but com-bines this with a strong focus on strategic execution.

His passion in Microinsurance has been cultivating an ecosystem of carriers and technology partners encouraging delivery solutions built on low-cost interoperable heterogeneous plat-forms. Although not critical path of his job, Canning champions Microsoft’s initiative by en-gaging multi-national carriers, speaking at Microsoft Executive Briefings Center, analyst briefings and working with organizations such as the MicroInsurance Centre.

In a prior role with Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team, Canning provided R&D product roadmap strategies to academic groups, venture capitalists and angel networks highlighting key opportunities hot-spot across the financial services industry in areas such as Financial Services, High Performance Computing and Security solutions.

Prior to Microsoft, he was the CTO of Group Insurance (L&A) at Prudential Financial, hav-ing held positions in both traditional IT and emerging technologies over his seven year tenure. Canning has over 27 years of IT Wall Street experience, with the last 18 engaged in the de-velopment and support across three market segments banking, insurance, capital markets and healthcare industry segments.

Craig Churchill, International Labour Organization

Craig Churchill has nearly two decades of microfinance experience in both developed and developing countries. In his current position in the ILO’s Social Finance Programme, he fo-cuses primarily on the role of financial services that the poor can use to manage risks and re-duce their vulnerability, including savings, insurance and emergency loans. He serves of the Chair of the CGAP Working Group on Microinsurance and on the Editorial Board of the Mi-croBanking Bulletin.

Craig has authored and edited over 40 articles, papers, monographs and training manuals on various microfinance topics including microinsurance, customer loyalty, organizational de-velopment, governance, lending methodologies, regulation and supervision, and financial ser-vices for the poorest of the poor. His most recent publication, Protecting the poor: A micro-insurance compendium (Geneva: ILO, Munich Re Foundation), which he edited, is the most authoritative book on the subject. He has a BA from Williams College and an MA from Clark University, both in Massachusetts.

Priya Jaisinghani, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Priya Jaisinghani is a program officer in the Global Development Program of the Bill & Me-linda Gates Foundation, which she joined in February 2005. She helped launch the Financial Services for the Poor program and currently focuses on identifying new products with the po-tential to increase microfinance’s impact.

Prior to joining the foundation, Ms. Jaisinghani launched the South Asia program at the Unit-ed Nations Foundation. She focused on building partnerships in support of UN causes includ-ing clean energy, biodiversity preservation, and reproductive health.

Ms. Jaisinghani began her career at Enron Corporation in Houston, Texas. There she focused on building new commodity markets in retail energy in the United States and global markets for broadband, steel, and pulp and paper -- work through which she gained broader insight into international infrastructure needs and the market inefficiencies affecting the developing world.

Ms. Jaisinghani received a Masters in International Affairs and Economics from Johns Hop-kins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where she specialized in international finance and development. She received a bachelor of science in finance from the University of Virginia. Ms. Jaisinghani has worked and studied in India, Cambodia, Singa-pore, and South Korea.

Denis Garand, Actuary and Independent Consultant

Graduate of University of Manitoba in 1981, obtained FCIA and FSA in 1987. From 1981 to 2000 worked for a Canadian cooperative insurance company as Group Actuary, Director of Marketing and Vice-President of Group insurance as well as an advisor to developing coop-erative insurers and an active participant in industry associations.

From 2000, Denis had been an independent consultant, focusing on the Canadian group and creditor insurance industry and international micro insurance programs.

• - Canadian assignments have included strategic reviews, capital management, training, product development, pricing, mergers, insurance company start up and the develop-ment of the first Canadian disability incidence study.
• - International assignments for BearingPoint, CGAP, ILO, GTZ, CCA, ICMIF and The World Bank have been in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Benin, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Egypt, Philippines, and Barbados working on all aspects of micro insurance and creditor insurance . With a principal specialty in micro health insurance.

Richard Leftley, Micro Insurance Agency

Richard joined Opportunity International's Technical Services Division in January 2002 as insurance product development manager. Richard previously worked as a reinsurance broker for Benfield Greig Ltd, the world's largest independent reinsurance broking group. Richard was responsible for the African account and worked closely with three others in a team cover-ing the Middle East and South East Asia.

Richard pioneered the introduction of insurance products within the Opportunity Network and this work has placed Opportunity as a market leader in the provision of insurance to the poor. At the end of June 2007 a range of insurance products were available to 3,300,000 clients and family members in Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Philippines, Mexico and Columbia.

In 2004 Richard was promoted to the position of Vice President for Planning & Operations and led a team of specialist consultants providing technical assistance to Opportunity partners in 29 countries in all areas of lending, savings, insurance, money transfer and client impact monitoring.

During 2005, Opportunity International launched the Micro Insurance Agency to provide a larger number of clients with access to insurance products; as President Richard has estab-lished the organisation and is setting its strategic direction.

Brandon Mathews, Zurich Financial Services

Brandon Mathews is Head of Microinsurance for Zurich Financial Services (Zurich). He joined Zurich in June 2007.

Brandon started his professional life in Germany in 1992 with General Motors Europe where he held various positions focusing on information systems, process improvement, and market-ing. In 1998, he joined American International Group’s foreign general insurance home office in New York to establish policy, claims, and customer service operations for a mass consumer offering in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Four years later he was appointed the Latin America regional executive for the same line of business. In this position, he started trade for the line in several markets, expanded the prod-uct offering, and served as director of related joint venture companies in Brazil and Mexico. During the same period, Brandon championed Microinsurance, presenting the subject to the CEO and Business Division CEOs and serving as a member of internal working groups on Microinsurance distribution and operations. Brandon is a frequent speaker on topics associ-ated with Microinsurance, and has worked with numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations to bring the benefits of modern risk management to traditionally underserved populations.

Brandon is a member of the American Council on Germany. He received his bachelor’s de-gree from the University of Rochester and his master’s degree from New York University. He is based in Zurich, Switzerland.

Amolo Ng’weno, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Amolo Ng'weno is a Senior Program Officer in the Financial Services in the Global Devel-opment Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Amolo joined the foundation from Kenya, where she was most recently working for the Trust for African Rock Art. Previously she was a co-founder of Africa Online, Africa's largest internet service provider, operating in eight countries. She also is a co-founder of an online retailer of African products, Bi-ashara.biz and has served as the Chairman of the Kenyan National Environmental Trust Fund of which she remains a trustee.

Amolo has significant experience in topics related to global development and financial ser-vices. She joined the World Bank through its selective Young Professionals Program, through which she served as an economist working in Francophone Africa, Pakistan and Jamaica. Since 1998, she helped establish and was a long-term board member of the Zimele Asset Management Ltd -- a pioneering provider of pooled investment vehicles (mutual funds) in the Kenyan market. She has an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and a BA in Psychology and Social Relations from Harvard.

Gabriele Ramm, Consultant to GTZ

Gabriele Ramm coordinates the Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) project of Munich Re and GTZ (German Technical Cooperation) on catastrophic risks in Indonesia and manages the PPP microinsurance project of Allianz Group and GTZ in India and Indonesia. As a consult-ant to GTZ she focused on social protection in the informal economy and microinsurance col-laborating with ILO and other organizations. Prior to 2001 she was GTZ Program Director in India heading poverty alleviation projects of microfinance/microinsurance, livelihood pro-grams, health, women empowerment and good governance.

During her tenure with the Friedrich Naumann Foundation she worked as the FNF Represen-tative in Nepal and Pakistan heading projects on industrial relations, social security, decen-tralization policy and training of environmental journalists.

Before joining projects of poverty alleviation she worked at German TV, Cologne (WDR), for the Foundation for International Development (now InWEnt) and the International Depart-ment of the German Adult Education Association in the areas of development support com-munication, visual literacy, adult education and intercultural communication/management.

G. Ramm has published several studies and articles on microinsurance/social protection and was a team member of the Microinsurance Landscape Study commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She holds two MA degrees in Political Science/Mass Communi-cation and Engineering.