About the author 

Lene M.P. Hansen has worked for 25 years as a field-based consultant in inclusive financial sector development and microfinance. Since 2005, she has specialised in expanding access to finance in fragile and conflict-affected environments. She has focused on financial inclusion of migrants and refugee populations since 2015, when she began the research resulting in the global Guidelines for FSPs, and has since worked with FSPs in Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Mozambique, and Uganda to financially include foreign born and displaced residents. Lene has served in longer-term project management positions in Nepal (1995-99), Uganda (1999-2003) and Palestine (2007) and provides shorter-term technical assistance in ‘refugee-readiness’ for FSPs, project design and appraisals, portfolio reviews and evaluations for donor agencies, investors and central banks; as well as training, performance monitoring and industry building support to microfinance industries primarily in Africa and the MENA region.

Based in South Africa, Lene holds a Master’s degree in Political Science from Copenhagen University and has been a visiting fellow at the Feinstein International Center of Tuft’s University, USA. She served on CGAP’s SmartAid Review Board in 2011 and is a member of the e-MFP Advancing Refugee Finance Action Group and the Danish Microfinance Forum.

Micol Pistelli is a Senior Financial Inclusion Coordinator at UNHCR, where she provides technical support to country operations aimed at promoting initiatives and efforts to ensure that forcibly displaced persons can participate in and benefit from formal financial services. Before joining UNHCR, Micol was the Director of Social Performance at MIX, where she helped shaping the international standards of social performance management for financial service providers in the microfinance industry.  She has also been a board advisor of several initiatives in the financial inclusion sector, a lecturer at the Master in microfinance and entrepreneurship at the Universidad Autonoma in Madrid, and a consultant with the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and with microfinance institutions in Egypt and Paraguay.

Micol  holds a Master’s Degree in International Economics and Development from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Bologna.