Shymaa Bedaiwy Allam

PhD Candidate in Global Inclusion and Social Development, University of Massachusetts

Shymaa Bedaiwy Allam is an internationally recognized inclusive finance and gender advisory specialist with more than 15 years of leadership experience across low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the MENA region. She has held senior roles at UN Women and the Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) of Egypt, where she served as the first woman to head the microfinance regulator and led the development of Egypt’s microfinance client protection guidelines and inclusive regulatory frameworks. Shymaa brings deep technical expertise in financial inclusion, policy advocacy, regulatory design, and women’s economic empowerment. At UN Women, she directed a $9 million multi-donor Financial Inclusion Program that reached over 160,000 rural women in Egypt and championed the digitisation of Village Savings and Lending Associations (VSLAs). Supported the Central Bank of Egypt and the National Council for Women in the rollout of the Tahwisha app, Egypt’s first digital platform for Village Savings and Lending Associations (VSLAs), contributing to content contextualization, user adoption strategies, and policy alignment with national digital financial inclusion goals. She has led high-level partnerships with central banks, fintech, and global actors, including J-PAL and Women’s World Banking, to strengthen gender-responsive policy design and program implementation. Shymaa is a published scholar on gender and regulation in microfinance, with work featured in IGI Global and the Journal of International Development. She is currently completing a PhD in Global Inclusion and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where her research focuses on the role of women loan officers in advancing client outcomes in Egypt’s microfinance sector.