Minerva Kotei

Minerva Kotei serves as the Project Lead at the SME Finance Forum, overseeing initiatives related to Data, the Global SME Finance Awards, and Non-Financial Services (including training and capacity building for financial institutions). As one of the Forum's founding members, she launched the work on Women’s Entrepreneurship Finance.
With more than 25 years of experience in the financial sector of emerging markets, Minerva has worked extensively in SME and gender finance, leasing, capital markets, and institutional advisory services. Her work has spanned East Asia, the Pacific, South Asia, East and West Africa, where she has delivered solutions for financial institutions and policy makers.
Throughout her career, Minerva has worked with various teams across the World Bank Group and led numerous knowledge initiatives, such as developing the Global Leasing Toolkit and Manual to share IFC’s four decades of leasing expertise, the MSME Finance Gap and the SME Finance Awards. Before joining IFC, she held positions at prominent financial institutions in Ghana.