Hussan Bano Burki is a senior economic development professional with more than 19 years of technical and managerial experience in development finance, small enterprise development, e-commerce, trade policy, and customs facilitation.

Currently based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Bano has developed and is implementing a regional trade resilience program in Central Asia aimed at delivering technical assistance to the respective governments and the private sector to counter the adverse effects of exogenous supply chain shocks on the economies and people of Central Asia including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Prior to this role, Bano was the Chief of Party of the Regional Economic Integration Activity (PREIA) in Pakistan and is credited for leading the project through two time and cost extensions. She has also successfully pivoted PREIA towards climate change risk mitigation and adaptation, leveraging the trade-focused project on expanding government and private sector awareness on the impact of market and regulatory drivers for decarbonization of supply chains on export competitiveness; and providing training and technical assistance to export sectors of Pakistan for transition to Net Zero goals to remain globally competitive.

Before that, she served as the Deputy Chief of Party for five years for the Pakistan Trade Project, for which she provided operational and technical guidance. Additionally, Bano served as component lead for the Widening Harmonized Access to Finance project in Pakistan, where she helped develop a standardized methodology for estimating effective market size for microfinance in Pakistan; market segmentation for financial services for women in Pakistan; and identification of systemic risks in Pakistan’s microfinance sector that led to mass delinquencies in 2009.

• M.B.A., Lahore University of Management Sciences