An evening with Rupert Scofield
Co-Founder and CEO of FINCA INT’L
Schiff Conference Center/Cintas – Xavier University
Thursday, February 27
5:30 reception/6:15 dinner/7:00 talk/discussion
Mr. Rupert Scofield co-founded FINCA International — the founder and majority owner of a global network of 20 microfinance institutions and banks on five continents — in 1984 and has served as President/CEO since 1994.
Rupert leads FINCA International on the next leg of its journey: supporting the rise of social enterprises delivering basic service and financial innovation. An expert on microfinance, social enterprise and impact investing, Rupert is an author, podcast presenter and frequent speaker, offering insights and guidance on market-based solutions to global poverty.
Rupert Scofield co-founded microfinance pioneer FINCA International (“FINCA”). As FINCA scaled around the world, so too did microfinance. Rupert learned what it took to start, build and run one of the original social enterprises and learned an invaluable lesson: to alleviate poverty takes a network of social enterprises that improve lives worldwide. Rupert will share why social enterprises are needed now more than ever to address the world’s pressing development challenges. He’ll ground this in firsthand experience of not only building and running a global social enterprise, but also becoming an investor in early-stage social enterprises through FINCA Ventures. Rupert will address the network effect of social enterprises and how social enterprise initiatives grew out of his recognition that access to basic services requires financial inclusion and that both are essential to poverty alleviation.
Event sponsored by:
While China is a member of the WTO, at the same time it has developed and pursued its own competing model of globalization, which not only competes with the Bretton-Woods model but is often in violation of the rules governing its membership in the WTO. The best example of the Chinese model of globalization is The Belt and Road Initiative – a long-term plan for regional interconnectivity and dominance in Asia to which China has committed some $8 trillion dollars. Both the WTO and The Belt and Road are facing significant challenges. This session will lay out in broad terms the two Globalizations allowing us to discuss this clash of globalizations and the implications for US foreign and trade policy.
Elizabeth Riorden earned her Master of Architecture degree from Columbia in 1981. After working as an architectural designer and registered architect, she returned to an earlier career interest: archaeology. With B.A. degree from Brown in Ancient and Medieval Culture (magna cum laude 1978), Riorden had a deep interest in the built environment of past civilizations. In 1989 she participated in excavations at Troy in Northwest Turkey. Her Troy drawings and articles appear in Studia Troica. In 2002 she became a full-time academic, teaching architectural design, history and preservation at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Architecture and Interior Design.