Sadaffe Abid is a Dubai-based consultant with Transformational Leadership Inc. She is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School and a top-ranked teaching fellow of the Adaptive Leadership course which has been consistently rated as the most formative course by Kennedy School alums. Sadaffe conducts leadership development trainings in Middle East North Africa (MENA) focused on high potential women professionals and entrepreneurs. She is also a Consultant to the International Finance Corporation for institution-building and gender diversity within the financial inclusion sector.
She led Kashf Foundation, one of largest microfinance institution’s (MFI) in Pakistan, as the COO and later as the CEO when Kashf was ranked 34th in the Forbes World’s Top 50 MFIs. As a leading practioner of microfinance and social enterprise and the founding team member, she helped scale Kashf from a pilot project in two rooms to serve 300,000 women clients, employ 2000 staff and disburse US$ 200 million to support micro-businesses.
Sadaffe has been a mentor to MIT Legatum Fellows and Acumen Fund investees. Her work at Kashf has been profiled in Nicholas Kristoff’s book, “Half the Sky”. She is a graduate of the Advanced Management Program and the Social Enterprise Program at INSEAD and Executive Education on Strategic Leadership from the Harvard Business School.
