On any given day, you’ll discover Maya Potter deep in dialog—interviewing males, girls, and women 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 function.
It’s a manner of working that feels revolutionary in its humility, and it’s additionally in her blood.
Maya is the granddaughter of Ela bhattthe visionary founding father of the Self-Employed Ladies’s Affiliation (SEWA) and one among Ladies’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 together with her, watching her stay her day-to-day life with integrity, the place every part she mentioned, or did, or believed, aligned so superbly and harmoniously, confirmed me the best way to stay my very own life.”
Maya was raised in Connecticut, however spent weeks annually in Ahmedabad. Her grandmother’s dwelling, she recollects, was “an enchanted place,” at all times filled with voices from SEWA girls, salt-pan employees, 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 underneath Reema Nanavaty’s steerage and met home-based craftswomen and salt-pan employees. That hands-on publicity helped floor the values she’d inherited. Later, earlier than faculty, she joined a monetary literacy course at SEWA Financial institution, studying alongside women her age from vastly completely different walks of life.
“Some have been finding out, others working, one was making ready for marriage…I spotted they’d 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 drawback, my grandmother began on the grassroots,” she explains. “She immersed herself within the each day lives of working girls—distributors, waste pickers, and home-based employees—to grasp their interior and outer worlds: the budgets they balanced, their nighttime worries.”
Maya studied anthropology at Smith School—”ethnography had already been woven into my life,” she says—and earned a Fulbright to review how road distributors use public area. She returned to SEWA to place these insights into motion.
Her grandmother’s values present up in sudden methods. At a gathering of The Elders, Maya noticed a dialogue the place somebody steered that consensus could possibly be reached quicker if “minor nations” have been disregarded of the equation. “I noticed my grandmother frown… Later she advised 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 monetary techniques the place they overlook girls. “I’ve come to comprehend that our monetary lives should 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 individuals merely bought conventional clothes from retailers—as an alternative, I discovered an intricate casual economic system… of non-public relationships, patronage, and gift-giving.”
The identical is true far past South Asia. “In rural Pennsylvania, feminine quilters function via surprisingly analogous networks of commissions, presents, and casual exchanges.” These monetary techniques exist—however as a result of they don’t match the formal mildew, they’re too usually ignored.
Visibility, Maya believes, is the important thing. Her grandmother’s friends—Martha Chen, Renana Jhabvala—knew knowledge could possibly be a instrument for justice. “The work of girls road distributors and home-based employees was being systematically ignored…visibility would require knowledge—and this knowledge needed to be within the palms of girls themselves.”
As we speak, as a analysis marketing consultant 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 best way, she’s seen how instruments like wearables and AI can illuminate girls’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 basic query stays: how will we put this knowledge in girls’s palms?”
Maya believes that options should match the fullness of girls’s lives. “Ladies’s lives don’t match neatly into sectors—neither ought to our options,” she says. “SEWA is an effective instance… not only a financial institution, union, or cooperative, however a company that acknowledges how a lady’s monetary life interweaves with every part else: her labor as an artisan, farmer, and mom; her function as a local weather defender and neighborhood chief.”
As Ladies’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.
Ladies’s World Banking is devoted to financial empowerment via monetary inclusion for the almost one billion girls on the planet with no or restricted entry to formal monetary providers. Utilizing our subtle market and client analysis, we flip insights into actual motion to design and advocate for coverage engagement, digital monetary options, office management applications, and gender lens investing.
As a part of our present technique, we’ve helped present over 86 million girls in rising markets entry and use of monetary services and products which might be remodeling girls’s lives, households, companies and communities, and driving inclusive development globally.
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