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Bangladeshi Woman Banker Mentored by Financial Firm Executive

Farzana Chowdhury gains management insights from ING's Kathleen Murphy

Farzana Chowdhury, a rising female bank executive from Bangladesh, says her participation in a monthlong business mentoring program sponsored by the U.S. State Department and Fortune 500 companies was a "once-in-a-lifetime experience."

Chowdhury was one of 17 participants from 14 countries in the first round of the Fortune/State Department International Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership program May 1-May 24. She worked with Kathleen Murphy, a group president in the ING financial services company based in Hartford, Connecticut.

"I was in a kind of 'shadow program' observing Murphy as she managed her day-to-day work. It was very inspiring for me to see a woman manage an entire division of one of the largest financial services company with so many other women colleagues," Chowhury said.

Chowdhury is first assistant vice president and head of the small and medium enterprise (SME) division at BRAC Bank in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is one of only "two women" among the 17 senior managers in the four-year-old bank.

By contrast, half of ING's management staff and 57 percent of the 11,000-strong work force are women.

BRAC Bank is part of the biggest nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the world known as BRAC. The acronym is derived from its origins in the early 1970s as the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. Since then, BRAC has expanded into other areas of development work and, more recently, has been registered as a foreign NGO in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. It now calls itself BRAC.

"There are 1,000 employees in the SME division helping to disburse loans between $4,000 to $40,000 to small and medium business enterprises," Chowdhury said.

Chowdhury said that the SME sector has grown in importance in Bangladesh after the resounding success of micro-credit lending to the poorest entrepreneurs by Grameen Bank and BRAC over the last 30 years.

BRAC Bank is a joint venture between BRAC, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank Group and ShoreBank of Chicago. BRAC holds majority share at 60 percent, and IFC and ShoreBank each hold 20 percent.

According to Chowdhury, BRAC Bank through its SME program expects to occupy the niche market just above micro-credit lending and below commercial level lending to richer borrowers.

Chowdhury holds a master's degree in business administration from Monash Univesity, Melbourne, Australia, and is a member and national treasurer of Junior Chamber International, a worldwide federation of young professionals and entrepreneurs headquartered in the United States.

During a week in Washington, she and her group met first lady Laura Bush at a White House meeting that included all the women executive assistants to President Bush. Then she met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the women under secretaries in the U.S. government, including Karen Hughes, the under secretary in charge of the State Department's Bureau of Public Diplomacy, as well as Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Dina Habib Powell.

Chowdhury said one of her memorable visits was to Discovery Communications, the global media and entertainment company headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland. Discovery's chief executive officer (CEO), Judith McHale, and other senior women executives hosted a luncheon for the group.

She and her group also had a luncheon discussion with Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who is publishing a book in October about her experiences as a woman CEO. A CBS crew for 60 Minutes, the most popular news program in America, filmed the meeting, Chowdhury said.

She and her colleagues visited Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business in Washington, where they participated in a discussion on women and the global marketplace.

Chowdhury said her program would end with a reception at Time Warner, the global media and entertainment company, in New York on May 24. After that she would take a week's vacation before returning to Bangladesh on June 1.

Source: U.S. Department of State