NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Diana Hollman is a program officer at Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Diana works on issues revolving around inclusive business, e.g. helping to set up BoP Sector Dialogues promoting inclusive business amongst business professionals through sector-specific practitioner guides and workshops.

After her graduate degree in business administration Diana worked at Philips developing and implementing international marketing communication strategies. She went back to school as a Fulbright student and completed her master degree in International Relations at the Maxwell School in Syracuse with an emphasis on Private Sector Development and Social Entrepreneurship.

As Mercator Fellow on International Affairs Diana spent one year working on topics concerning the interface between business and development working on issues related to the advancement of inclusive and sustainable entrepreneurship. As part of her Fellowship, Diana collaborated with the WRI New Ventures’ research initiatives around clean energy for the base of the pyramid, worked with the UNDP Egypt on the development of pro-poor business models and inclusive markets as well as with Keystone Accountability on impact measurement in the social investment space. At Keystone she implemented the first benchmarked survey of investee views of social investor performance.

Diana has lived and worked in Germany, UK, Egypt, Jordan, South Africa, USA and Peru. She has supported local entrepreneurs and worked with a diversity of institutions including UNIDO, UNDP, Ashoka and Dialogue Social Enterprise.

Christina Gradl is a founder and managing director of Endeva, an independent think tank working towards enterprise solutions for development. She is also a strategic advisor to the UNDP Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative and a Research Fellow at the CSR Initiative of the Harvard Kennedy School.

Since 2006, Christina has worked on building, sharing and applying knowledge around inclusive business and sustainable development with diverse partners from the public and private sectors, including the Bertelsmann Stiftung, UNDP, UNEP, Eon and Allianz. Christina is currently completing her Ph.D. in Strategy and Economics. She holds an M.Sc. in from LSE and a Master’s degree from the University of Passau (Germany). Previously, Christina worked with McKinsey and Company as a consultant and with rice farmers in Madagascar on exporting their rice.