Sheryl Sandberg is chief operating officer at Facebook, overseeing the firm's business operations. She also serves on Facebook’s board of directors. Prior to Facebook, Sheryl was vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Clinton, a management consultant with McKinsey & Company, and an economist with the World Bank.

Sheryl received a BA summa cum laude from Harvard University and an MBA with highest distinction from Harvard Business School. Sheryl is the co-author of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy with Wharton professor and bestselling author Adam Grant. She is also the author of the bestsellers Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and Lean In for Graduates. She is the founder of the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to build a more equal and resilient world through two key initiatives, LeanIn.Org and OptionB.Org. Sheryl serves on the boards of Facebook, Women for Women International, ONE, and SurveyMonkey. Sheryl lives in Menlo Park with her fiancé and their five children.

Ebele Okobi is Facebook’s Public Policy Director for Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. Prior to joining Facebook, she was Global Head of Human Rights at Yahoo, in the management development program in Nike’s EMEA headquarters, a Senior Director of Advisory Services at Catalyst in Silicon Valley and Amsterdam; a consumer rights policy fellow at Consumers Union in San Francisco and a securities and mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York, Paris and London. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of Junior Achievement Africa and a Trustee of Care International UK. She attended the University of Southern California, Columbia Law School and HEC-Paris.

Katherine is responsible for the successful implementation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality strategy across a range of countries and initiatives. She leads a team of professionals driving work on women’s employment and enterprise, women’s collectives, barriers to work, and gender data, and also leads the foundation’s Gender Equality and COVID-19 workstream. Katherine is a seasoned gender and development expert with two decades of in-country experience in South Asia. Prior to joining the Gender Equality team in Seattle in 2017, Katherine was a Deputy Director at the Foundation’s India Country Office.

Before joining the Gates Foundation, Katherine was an Evaluation Specialist at the International Development Research Centre, where she coordinated and lead research on women’s collectives, livelihoods, decentralization, economic inclusion, and health equity. Katherine has many publications to her credit, on gender and health systems, intimate partner violence, and women’s collectives, including most recently, work in the Lancet on gender equality, norms, and health. Katherine coined and conceptualized ‘evaluation field building,’ positioning evaluation as transformative, and wrote on, and lead investments in feminist evaluation and policy. Her work with women’s collectives goes back to 2005 when she developed and lead one of the first women’s health and empowerment projects using self-help groups in 7 States in India. Katherine has also designed and led organizational strengthening efforts with hundreds of research organizations across Asia. Katherine has an M.A. in International Affairs from Carleton University, and a B.E.S in Environmental Studies from the University of Waterloo.

Prior to joining the foundation, Katherine was an evaluation specialist at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in New Delhi. In her 12 years at IDRC, she helped shaped an evaluative and results-oriented culture at IDRC. Among other work, she led the corporate performance assessment (of the then $200 million annual portfolio) and global evaluations of research portfolios on governance, equity, and health valued at over $75 million. While at IDRC, she coined and conceptualized ‘evaluationfield building’, positioning evaluation as transformative, and wrote and led investments in feminist evaluation. She successfully developed and led one of the first women’s health and empowerment projects using self-help groups in 7 states (India) with 600 community based organizations. She also designed and led organizational strengthening with 100+ research organizations across Asia.

Katherine has an M.A. in International Affairs from Carleton University, Ottawa. She also has a bachelor’s in Environmental Studies from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Lamia Kamal-Chaoui is the Director of the OECD Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities
since 2016. Supported by a team of over 130 staff, Ms. Kamal-Chaoui leads the Organisation’s work in
the fields of:

● SME and entrepreneurship policy;
● regional, urban, rural and local development;
● subnational statistics;
● multi-level governance and decentralisation;
● and tourism.

As a key member of the OECD Senior Management team, Ms. Kamal-Chaoui supports the Secretary-
General in achieving the OECD’s mission to advance economic growth and social progress as well as contributing to other global agendas such as the G20, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Ms. Kamal-Chaoui has held several senior positions at the OECD since 1998. From 2012 to 2016, she served as Senior Advisor to the OECD Secretary-General. In this role, she supported the Secretary-General’s strategic agenda and led the OECD Inclusive Growth initiative, the Knowledge-Sharing Alliance programme, the development of the Global Deal and the implementation of the OECD Strategy on Development. From 2003 to 2012, she was Head of the Urban Programme in the Directorate for Public Governance and Territorial Development. She has also previously worked in the Trade Directorate and the Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs. Before joining the OECD, Ms. Kamal-Chaoui worked for a university-based research institute as well as several media outlets.

During her extensive career at the OECD, she has forged numerous strategic partnerships and
collaborations for the OECD. They include major philanthropic organisations (e.g. Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Rockefeller Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations) as well as other prominent organisations (e.g. Vatican Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, Club of Madrid), multilateral institutions (World Bank, IADB, ADB, EBRD, European Commission) and the private sector. She has been a member of several International Committees and Advisory Boards (World Economic Forum Deputy Board of Trustees, Shanghai World Expo, Michael Bloomberg Mayors Challenge for Europe, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo’s Strategic Committee). She has also been a Lecturer at Sciences Po Paris.

Ms. Kamal-Chaoui is a French and Moroccan national. She holds a Master’s Degree in Macroeconomics
from the University of Paris Dauphine and a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and History from the University of Paris Diderot. She recently received the ""Women of the Decade in Enterprise and Leadership"" award of the Women's Economic Forum.

Henriette leads the Gender and Economic Inclusion Group at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group. She serves as an advocate for gender equality issues in the private sector and works with IFC’s clients to include both women and men as entrepreneurs, employees, consumers, community stakeholders and leaders. She leads a global team that is engaged in co-creating gender-smart private sector solutions through research, investments, advice and peer learning platforms.

Before joining IFC in September 2013, Henriette was the CEO of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, where she remains involved as a senior advisor. Earlier in her career, Henriette was the UN representative in the Middle East Quartet team advising Tony Blair in Jerusalem. She also worked for the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO). She has held positions as governance advisor with the European Commission Delegation to Tanzania, the German Technical Cooperation Agency in Germany, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Tanzania, where she worked on conflict reduction, civic education, and socioeconomic issues in East Africa.

Henriette graduated with an MSc in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and received her MA from Freiburg University, Germany. She is also a Harvard Kennedy School Women in Public Policy Program fellow (2018). Henriette is a Bucerius and Hertie summer school alumna and a frequent contributor to blogs hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Huffington Post, and Business Fights Poverty.

Mari Silvia, born and raised in an indigenous village in the southern state of Oaxaca [Pronunciation:Wah-haw-kah], Mexico—is a lawyer by profession, but in 2015 she reconsidered what she really wanted to do with her life. She learned to make traditional embroidery work for Oaxacan [Pronunciation: Wah-haw-kanh] costumes from her great grandmother, and this made her think about opening a business.

This is how La Teca de Oro, her business, was born and where she currently generates a workspace for more than 40 women from inidigenous communities. She wanted to grow the business and sell her products outside of Mexico, reaching places such as Chile, Peru, Europe and the United States through online sales, and sometimes making her products known at the fashion weeks in other countries.

From the beginning, the Fanpage on Facebook was essential for her, since it is the place where she showcases her products, generates sales and reaches her customers and people who are interested in La Teca de Oro.

COVID-19

In 2020, with the COVID-19 outbreak, her collaborators were afraid of losing sales or that La Teca de Oro would close because the Oaxaca region was predicted to be one of the most affected by the pandemic.

However, Mari let them know that the pandemic would not affect them as much because they did not sell in a physical space; they sold to everyone through the internet and Facebook. And they will continue to do it so.

With this scenario, Mari had to think of several ideas so that her sales did not decrease, and she opted for a strategy of ""future sales"" whereby customers would pay part of their products and the rest when they received them.