Brigit Helms has more than 30 years of experience pioneering innovative approaches to financial inclusion and seeking enterprise and market-based solutions to poverty. She is currently Executive Director of Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University, which combines global social entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley executive mentors, and the University community to accelerate solutions that fight poverty and protect the planet.
Before Miller Center, Brigit was VP for Technical Services at DAI, leading a team of experts on a range of issues, including development finance. At DAI, she wrote Access for All: Building Inclusive Economic Systems, which curates existing knowledge about how to leverage markets to pull people out of poverty in emerging and frontier markets. She came to DAI after leading the Multilateral Investment Fund, an innovation lab of the Inter-American Development Bank making investments equaling $85 million a year. Prior to this, she was Chief of Party of the SPEED program in Mozambique, leading DAI’s work to improve the business environment and competitiveness of the economy there.
Prior to joining DAI for the first time, Brigit served as Senior Expert for financial inclusion at McKinsey & Company in Seattle; Chief Executive Officer of Unitus, a nonprofit with offices in Seattle, Bangalore, and Nairobi; and an executive at the International Finance Corporation in East Asia, most recently as the Head of Advisory Services for Indonesia. Brigit was a founding management team member of CGAP, the global center of excellence for financial inclusion.