Rosita Najmi joined the Tahirih Justice Center board of directors in 2019 and serves as the Chair of the Development Committee. Her relationship to Tahirh has included serving as first a summer intern, and after college, the inaugural Baha’i Service Fellow.
Rosita is a development finance leader and driver of global social, environmental, and economic development innovations and outcomes for over 20 years. Rosita began her career as a social entrepreneur and co-founded a public health international NGO in West Africa. She has gone on to be a digitally fluent global executive and intrapreneur in the corporate world (PayPal and UPS), philanthropy (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Omidyar Network), international development (World Bank), and civil society (Mercy Corps, Accion, America’s Promise).
She brings topical expertise in digital financial inclusion and economic empowerment, gender equality, and climate adaptation and resilience. Her functional track record includes leading strategy, impact measurement, grantmaking, data for good, impact investing, ESG (including DEI), humanitarian response, CSR (including market-based approaches), policy advocacy, learning, knowledge management, and field building.
She has advised and led multi-stakeholder collaborations with governments, the private sector, civil society, and multilateral organizations, including the G7 and G20. She is a champion of collective action and has architected and led several innovative global partnerships, coalitions, networks, and alliances, including FinEquity, Climate Innovation for Adaptation and Resilience Alliance (CIFAR), Data2X Women’s Financial Inclusion Data Partnership, among others. She has funded and helped design and execute pioneering operational programs in regtech for regulators, privacy by design, and access to finance for people with disabilities. She created and served on the advisory board of the DIGITAX Program at the International Center for Tax and Development (ICTD), which has explored how tax policy can impact usage of digital financial services and how digital financial services and digital ID can increase efficiency and equity of tax administration. Her early field research and publications have explored female participation in microfinance and commercialization of microfinance.
Rosita’s geographic breadth includes Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, Central Europe, and East Asia, including experiences in Benin, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mongolia, Philippines, Samoa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and BA in Economics, French, and Politics from Wake Forest University. Her TED talk on multilingual leadership has been translated in 8 languages. She is based in Washington, DC.
Education: Harvard Business School, MBA; Wake Forest University, BA
