Victoria Kisyombe

Dr. Victoria Kisyombe transformed women’s economic participation by redesigning who finance is built for. By adapting leasing, a corporate financial instrument, into a pathway for low-income women to acquire income-generating assets, she created a system through which women without collateral can build ownership, enterprise and economic identity in their own names. Her work has reshaped asset-based financing in Tanzania and influenced approaches to women’s economic development across the world.

Leasing in Tanzania, as in much of the world, was historically designed for corporations and formal businesses acquiring vehicles, machinery and industrial equipment. It operated within a financial architecture built for asset holders that included registered firms, titled landowners and established enterprises with collateral and formal credit histories.

Dr. Victoria redesigned this mechanism for women operating in the informal economy. Through SELFINA, productive assets such as dairy cows, sewing machines, milling machines, irrigation pumps and solar equipment are purchased and leased to women under repayment schedules aligned with their earning patterns. Women begin generating income immediately and repay from production. At the end of the lease period, ownership of the asset is legally transferred into the woman’s name.

This innovation changed the sequence of economic participation. Instead of borrowing unsecured cash, women begin as producers with a productive tool that generates income from the outset. The asset itself becomes the entry point into finance. Over time, women build businesses, accumulate capital and establish financial credibility within systems that previously excluded them.

By institutionalizing this model within Tanzania’s financial system, Victoria transformed leasing from a corporate financing tool into a pathway through which women in the informal economy can acquire productive assets and build businesses in their own names. The success of this approach drew the attention of global financial institutions. Through partnerships with the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, the model has been adopted and expanded in programs supporting women entrepreneurs in countries around the world with Victoria continuing to play a leading role in shaping its application.

In Tanzania and across much of sub-Saharan Africa, women are central to production yet peripheral to ownership. They cultivate food crops, manage livestock, trade in markets and operate micro-enterprises that sustain local economies. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), women account for nearly half of the agricultural labor force in sub-Saharan Africa and produce a significant share of household food supplies. Their work underpins household income and national productivity. Yet the legal and financial systems that determine economic power are not structured around their realities.

Customary inheritance systems and patriarchal norms concentrate land, housing and productive assets in men’s names. Women contribute labor and income but rarely hold documented ownership. A woman may farm family land for decades yet have no legal claim to it. She may help build a household enterprise but not appear on business registration documents or property titles. Widows often lose access to land or property upon the death of a husband, while divorced women frequently face similar insecurity. Evidence from the World Bank’s land governance assessments and Tanzania’s Ministry of Lands indicates that fewer than 20 percent of land titles in Tanzania are held individually by women. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the FAO’s Gender and Land Rights Database similarly shows that women consistently own and control far less land than men despite their central role in agricultural production.

Because access to formal finance is built on collateral, exclusion from property cascades into exclusion from capital. Banks assess creditworthiness through titled land, registered businesses, fixed property and guarantors, forms of security overwhelmingly held by men. Women operating in informal markets rarely meet these criteria regardless of their repayment discipline or potential. The African Development Bank and the FAO report that women farmers in Africa receive less than 10 percent of available agricultural credit. At the same time, research from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates that women entrepreneurs across the region face a financing gap of more than 40 billion dollars in access to capital for small and medium enterprises. Even women running profitable micro and small businesses are often unable to secure loans simply because they lack legally recognized assets.

Financial inclusion initiatives expanded access to loans but did not alter this structural imbalance. Microcredit programs offer small loans under short repayment cycles that prioritize repayment over growth. In practice, many of these loans supported small trading activities or short-term household needs rather than investment in productive equipment, livestock or machinery that could significantly increase income. Studies from the International Finance Corporation and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor show that women-owned businesses across Africa receive only a small share of formal financing despite representing nearly one-third of the continent’s small and medium enterprises.

As a result, women’s economic participation rarely translates into asset ownership or long-term financial security. Women generate substantial economic value in agriculture, trade and local markets, yet remain largely absent from the ownership structures and financial systems that determine economic mobility. This exclusion has consequences far beyond income, limiting women’s influence over household decisions, access to education and healthcare for their families, food security and their ability to build long-term stability for their children.

Dr. Victoria translated her idea into practice in 2002 when she founded the Sero Lease and Finance (SELFINA), the first micro-leasing institution in Tanzania dedicated to enabling low income women to acquire productive assets. SELFINA introduced a new form of financing designed for women excluded from traditional credit systems because they lacked collateral, formal employment records or titled property.

The model begins with women who are already economically active but constrained by the absence of productive tools. SELFINA works with each participant to identify the asset that would most significantly increase her income. These assets range from dairy cows and irrigation pumps for farmers to sewing machines, milling machines, food-processing equipment and transport tools used by traders and small manufacturers.

Rather than issuing unsecured cash loans, SELFINA purchases the asset directly and leases it to the woman under a structured repayment agreement aligned with her income cycle. The woman immediately begins using the asset to generate income and repays the lease gradually from her earnings. During the leasing period, SELFINA provides business training, financial literacy education and technical support on managing and maintaining the asset. When the lease is fully repaid, ownership of the asset is transferred legally into the woman’s name. In this way, women move from informal economic participation to asset ownership while building a financial record within formal systems that previously excluded them.

Since its founding, SELFINA has enabled more than 40,000 women to acquire productive assets and expand their economic activities. Through these transactions, the organization has facilitated access to assets valued at more than USD 20 million. Program evaluations show that women participating in the leasing program increase their household incomes by 65 percent after acquiring productive assets. As their businesses expand, the model has also generated more than 30,000 jobs across local economies in agriculture, food processing, trade and small-scale manufacturing.

SELFINA operates through a revolving financing structure designed to ensure sustainability. Lease repayments are reinvested into financing new assets for additional participants allowing the model to grow without depending solely on donor funding. Over time this mechanism has demonstrated that low-income women can successfully manage asset-based financing when financial systems are designed around their economic realities.

Beyond operating SELFINA, Victoria has worked to change the broader financial environment in which the model operates. Through advocacy and engagement with policymakers and financial sector actors, she helped elevate asset leasing as a legitimate financial tool for small entrepreneurs and contributed to the development of Tanzania’s financial leasing regulatory framework. These reforms, including the Financial Leasing Act and leasing regulations overseen by the Bank of Tanzania, formally recognized asset-based leasing as a financing instrument for small and medium enterprises and opened the door for innovative models such as SERO’s to operate within the financial system.

As the regulatory framework took shape, commercial banks and financial institutions began adapting elements of the model within their own lending structures. Institutions such as the Tanzania Women’s Bank, CRDB Bank, and NMB Bank introduced financial products that increasingly recognized productive assets and business activity as entry points into finance for entrepreneurs who previously lacked traditional collateral. Similar approaches have also been adopted by regional institutions, including Equity Bank, which has expanded asset-based lending products across East Africa. These developments signaled a broader shift within the financial sector, where asset-backed financing and leasing mechanisms began to be recognized as viable pathways for extending capital to small entrepreneurs, particularly women operating in informal and small-scale enterprises.

As the success of SELFINA became visible, Victoria began sharing the model internationally. Through collaborations with institutions such as the World Bank, World Economic Forum and the International Finance Corporation, she led trainings for policymakers, financial institutions and development organizations interested in adapting this model to their own contexts. In these engagements, Victoria worked directly with partners to redesign financial products, adapt leasing structures to local regulatory environments and build institutional capacity to implement asset-based financing for women entrepreneurs.

Through this process, the SELFINA model has informed financial inclusion initiatives in several African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Ghana and has influenced programs supporting women’s access to productive assets in parts of Asia and Latin America. Victoria trained development practitioners and financial sector leaders across these regions, helping them translate the principles of asset-based financing into locally adapted programs.

Victoria’s model has also become a reference point in the study of inclusive financial systems. Development institutions and academic programs examining financial inclusion and gender-responsive economic policy increasingly analyze the approach as a practical example of how financial architecture can be redesigned to reach entrepreneurs operating outside traditional collateral-based lending structures. In Tanzania, universities such as the University of Dar es Salaam and Mzumbe University examine SELFINA’s asset-based leasing approach within courses on development finance, entrepreneurship and gender economics. These academic engagements enable students and practitioners to understand how productive assets can serve as entry points into finance for women operating in informal economies.

International institutions, including the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, have documented SELFINA as an important innovation linking microfinance and commercial banking to reach women entrepreneurs. Victoria has also contributed to academic and policy discussions globally, including serving as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Through lectures, policy dialogues and practitioner trainings delivered across Africa and internationally, she continues to shape conversations on how financial systems can better support women’s economic participation and asset ownership.

From 2019 to 2025 she was the Coordinator for the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE), where she mentored and supported women entrepreneurs across Tanzania. Today, Victoria continues to evolve the model to address emerging challenges faced by women entrepreneurs.

Building on SELFINA’s core leasing model, Victoria is introducing new financial innovations such as sale-and-leaseback financing. In this approach, women who already own productive assets such as livestock, processing equipment or machinery can sell the asset to a financing institution and immediately lease it back. This allows them to unlock capital tied up in the asset while continuing to use it to generate income. The capital released through the transaction can then be reinvested in expanding production, purchasing additional equipment or diversifying their businesses.

Victoria is also expanding the model through partnerships with renewable energy providers that enable women entrepreneurs to acquire solar-powered equipment for businesses operating in off-grid areas. These technologies include solar-powered milling machines, refrigeration units, irrigation systems and energy kiosks that allow women to expand their businesses while providing essential services within their communities.

In agriculture, Victoria is extending the model across food value chains, financing equipment for farming, processing and distribution. By enabling women farmers and traders to access productive tools, the approach increases productivity, reduces post-harvest losses and strengthens food security within local markets.

Through these evolving innovations, Victoria continues to expand the possibilities of asset-based financing demonstrating how financial systems can be redesigned to enable women not only to participate in economic activity, but to own the productive assets that shape long-term economic opportunity and security.

Dr. Victoria Kisyombe grew up in Mbeya in south-western Tanzania, an agricultural region where livestock and farming form the backbone of rural livelihoods. From an early age, she observed the central role women played in sustaining household economies, tending livestock, cultivating crops, and managing small trading activities. Yet despite their labor and responsibility, ownership of land and productive assets almost always remained in men’s names. These early observations would later shape her understanding of the structural barriers women faced in building economic security.

Victoria pursued veterinary medicine, a field rarely entered by women at the time. Her training placed her at the intersection of agriculture, livestock production and rural livelihoods. She later worked with the Tanzanian government and with development programs supported by the Swiss government, traveling extensively through rural communities. Through this work she saw how relatively small productive investments such as livestock, farming equipment or processing tools could transform a household’s income and stability. At the same time, she repeatedly encountered the same structural constraint: women were managing productive assets but rarely owned them.

The problem became deeply personal when Victoria lost her husband. She inherited only one cow named Sero. The milk and income from Sero became the primary means through which she sustained her household during this difficult period. When she attempted to access a loan to stabilize and expand her economic activities, financial institutions rejected her application because she lacked recognized collateral; the cow that sustained her family was not considered an acceptable asset within the formal financial system. The experience crystallized what she had already been observing across communities: for many women, a single productive asset can determine whether a family survives economic shock or falls into poverty, yet the financial structures meant to provide support often fail to recognize the assets women actually possess.

Motivated by this experience, Victoria began organizing women facing similar barriers. In 1995 she founded the Sero Business Women’s Association (SEBA), naming the organization after the cow that had sustained her family. SEBA created a platform for women to support one another and brought greater visibility to the structural barriers preventing women from accessing capital and productive assets.

Through this work, Victoria came to a clear conclusion: the financial system itself was designed around collateral and property ownership that women rarely held. Even capable and disciplined women were excluded from finance because they lacked assets registered in their own names. Determined to change this structure, she began designing a model that would allow women to begin with the asset itself rather than collateral. In 2002, she founded the Sero Lease and Finance Association (SELFINA), again drawing the name from Sero to institutionalize an asset-based leasing model that enables women to acquire productive assets and repay gradually from the income those assets generate.

Victoria’s work has attracted recognition within global and national conversations on women’s economic empowerment and inclusive finance. Her leadership in expanding women’s access to productive assets has been acknowledged through honors such as the Social Entrepreneur of the Year for Africa Award and the Vital Voices Global Leadership Award for Economic Empowerment, an international initiative founded by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that recognizes women advancing economic opportunity worldwide. In Tanzania, her contributions to strengthening women’s economic participation have also been recognized through the Women of Determination Award, presented during the country’s 50 years independence anniversary celebrations to honor women whose work has significantly advanced national development and women’s empowerment.

At the core of Victoria’s work is an unwavering belief that lasting economic empowerment for women must be grounded in ownership. Throughout her career she has remained closely connected to the women she serves, often working directly with farmers, traders and small entrepreneurs to understand their realities and continuously refine the model to respond to their needs.

Today, Victoria continues to contribute to the field as a mentor, advisor and global voice for women’s economic empowerment. Through her engagement with organizations such as the Academy for Women Entrepreneurs (AWE), as well as through lectures, policy dialogues and practitioner trainings across Africa and internationally, she supports emerging women entrepreneurs while continuing to shape how financial systems can better enable women’s ownership, leadership and economic participation.