STOP ME IF YOU CAN

Durreen Shahnaz recalls her grandmother making kanthas – blankets out of old saris. Years later, working in microfinance, she watched rural women making the same blankets, “dispatches of defiant hope”.

Shahnaz, an Oslo Business for Peace Award honoree (often referred to as the Nobel Prize for Business), a financial rainmaker in Forbes 50 over 50 and an Asia Society Game Changer awardee, was born a fighter.

She turned to the Enrich Your Word Power section in Reader’s Digest when her lack of fluency in English held her back after the family moved to the Philippines from Bangladesh. Her parents wanted to send her to an Indian university but she applied to ones in America. And at 17, left for the US, armed with a scholarship, “a single suitcase and a heart full of hope”.

There was no stopping her. She gained admission to the London School of Economics and she worked at Morgan Stanley – the first Bangladeshi woman to work on Wall Street – developing a thick skin to deal with a toxic environment.

She threw it all up to go work with Mohammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank who received the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit and microfinance.

She was accepted at Wharton Business School for a joint program with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She founded a company, oneNest, to connect women, artisans and microbusinesses from underserved communities with global markets.

When investors made it clear her services as CEO were no longer needed – she was not only a woman belonging to a minority community, she was also a mother, a “double liability” – she regrouped and reinvented herself.

She dealt with the heartbreak of seeing others recoil from her second baby who was born with a medical condition, filled with the realization that she would have to ensure both the child’s health and her inclusion in a world that may not want to embrace her.

She came to a deeper understanding of how women think and function. “Why do women so often think of what may go wrong instead of what may go right? Perhaps we have been so effectively conditioned by society to protect and preserve our loved ones and the status quo that we become risk averse.”

She came up with the idea of a social stock exchange, a trading platform linking financial performance to social and environmental results. She founded Impact Investment Exchange. She gave TED Talks at which she spoke to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, and concluded that a sari-clad woman talking about taking down a system that had so richly benefited Big Business held little appeal for most. But she kept at it, pushing The Women’s Livelihood Bond, working to make finance work for the 99%.

It would become the world’s first gender-lens impact investing security to be listed on the stock exchange.

The Defiant Optimist is the story of a remarkable woman, one who challenged traditional gender roles and expectations, who broke barriers to create good in countless ways.

Defiant optimism is the stubborn belief that systems that enrich the few can be transformed for the good of the many. 

As a little girl, her daughter Diya questioned the owner of a garment factory in Bangladesh on the conditions the women toil under. “But uncle, that is a really dangerous staircase. The aunties need to go up and down just to use the bathroom?”

Picture the pride and joy in Durreen Shahnaz’s heart as she witnesses the next generation step up.