On any given day, you’ll discover Maya Potter deep in dialog—interviewing males, ladies, and ladies from all walks of life. From small-town revitalization to the rise of AI, from fandom to on-line bullying, her work is rooted in listening deeply and with goal.
It’s a method of working that feels revolutionary in its humility, and it’s additionally in her blood.
Maya is the granddaughter of Ela Bhatt, the visionary founding father of the Self-Employed Girls’s Affiliation (SEWA) and certainly one of Girls’s World Banking’s founding members. She carries ahead her grandmother’s legacy of radical empathy and grassroots knowledge—however not by replicating it. Maya is reshaping it for a brand new era, the place tradition, knowledge, and complexity demand new instruments and new voices.
“I want I may recall a dramatic incident with my grandmother that grew to become a turning level in my life,” she says. “However the actuality was that rising up along with her, watching her reside her day-to-day life with integrity, the place every little thing she stated, or did, or believed, aligned so fantastically and harmoniously, confirmed me the way in which to reside my very own life.”
Maya was raised in Connecticut, however spent weeks annually in Ahmedabad. Her grandmother’s residence, she recollects, was “an enchanted place,” at all times filled with voices from SEWA ladies, salt-pan staff, and union leaders. “I beloved to pay attention to those tales and noticed how rigorously my grandmother listened to everybody and slowly constructed consensus.”
At 13, Maya spent a summer season at SEWA’s Commerce Facilitation Heart garment unit in Kutch beneath Reema Nanavaty’s steerage and met home-based craftswomen and salt-pan staff. That hands-on publicity helped floor the values she’d inherited. Later, earlier than school, she joined a monetary literacy course at SEWA Financial institution, studying alongside ladies her age from vastly completely different walks of life.
“Some had been finding out, others working, one was making ready for marriage…I spotted they might be placing their new monetary data into follow instantly. Conversations with my grandmother about my classmates’ lives opened my eyes to the levels of poverty: one meal, two meals, three meals poor.”
That early publicity formed her path. “In approaching any downside, my grandmother began on the grassroots,” she explains. “She immersed herself within the day by day lives of working ladies—distributors, waste pickers, and home-based staff—to know their internal and outer worlds: the budgets they balanced, their nighttime worries.”
Maya studied anthropology at Smith Faculty—”ethnography had already been woven into my life,” she says—and earned a Fulbright to review how road distributors use public house. She returned to SEWA to place these insights into motion.
Her grandmother’s values present up in surprising methods. At a gathering of The Elders, Maya noticed a dialogue the place somebody instructed that consensus may very well be reached sooner if “minor nations” had been neglected of the equation. “I noticed my grandmother frown… Later she informed me no nation or voice ought to ever be dismissed as small or minor…every particular person and nation’s perspective ought to carry equal weight.” It was a second that caught. “True knowledge acknowledges dignity in all voices.”
That very same dedication drives Maya’s exploration of economic methods the place they overlook ladies. “I’ve come to comprehend that our monetary lives usually are not solely gendered, but in addition deeply cultural.” In India, dowries push households into debt. In Bhutan, weaving traditions are each cultural heritage and financial security nets. “We had assumed folks merely bought conventional clothes from retailers—as a substitute, I discovered an intricate casual financial system… of private relationships, patronage, and gift-giving.”
The identical is true far past South Asia. “In rural Pennsylvania, feminine quilters function by surprisingly analogous networks of commissions, presents, and casual exchanges.” These monetary methods exist—however as a result of they don’t match the formal mould, they’re too typically ignored.
Visibility, Maya believes, is the important thing. Her grandmother’s friends—Martha Chen, Renana Jhabvala—knew knowledge may very well be a device for justice. “The work of ladies road distributors and home-based staff was being systematically ignored…visibility would require knowledge—and this knowledge needed to be within the fingers of ladies themselves.”
Immediately, as a analysis guide at ReD Associates, she makes use of ethnography to assist organizations perceive actual lives—work that has taken her from Texas to rural Pennsylvania. Alongside the way in which, she’s seen how instruments like wearables and AI can illuminate ladies’s monetary realities in highly effective new methods. “Wearables allow us to seize our personal experiences, whereas AI helps us perceive these experiences at scale. The elemental query stays: how can we put this knowledge in ladies’s fingers?”
Maya believes that options should match the fullness of ladies’s lives. “Girls’s lives don’t match neatly into sectors—neither ought to our options,” she says. “SEWA is an efficient instance… not only a financial institution, union, or cooperative, however a company that acknowledges how a girl’s monetary life interweaves with every little thing else: her labor as an artisan, farmer, and mom; her position as a local weather defender and group chief.”
As Girls’s World Banking celebrates 45 years, we honor the pioneers who laid the inspiration and the brand new leaders constructing on it. In Maya, we see each. From the legacy of Ela Bhatt to the challenges of our time, she reminds us that finance, at its finest, is about tales, visibility, and dignity.
Girls’s World Banking is devoted to financial empowerment by monetary inclusion for the almost one billion ladies on this planet with no or restricted entry to formal monetary providers. Utilizing our subtle market and shopper analysis, we flip insights into actual motion to design and advocate for coverage engagement, digital monetary options, office management packages, and gender lens investing.
As a part of our present technique, we’ve helped present over 86 million ladies in rising markets entry and use of economic services which are reworking ladies’s lives, households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive development globally.
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