Barbara Magnoni is a public intellectual and practitioner working at the intersection of finance, development, and lived economic experience. For more than 25 years, she has helped institutions rethink how systems designed to manage risk, capital, and growth actually function for the people they are meant to serve.

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Her work centers on vulnerable households and small businesses—particularly women-led enterprises—operating at the margins of formal systems. Barbara is known for combining deep field exposure with strategic clarity, and for challenging approaches that prioritize scale, compliance, or technical elegance over real outcomes.

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She has served as a senior advisor and thought partner to global institutions, contributing to program design, execution strategy, and monitoring and learning frameworks. Across regions, her influence lies less in operational control and more in shaping direction, surfacing blind spots, and helping teams reconnect strategy with reality.

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Barbara has also co-founded companies and professional networks, served on boards, and mentored emerging leaders across continents. Mentorship—especially of women and non-traditional candidates—is a core part of her practice, reflecting her belief that inclusive systems require inclusive leadership pipelines.

Cooper is a Research Professional at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, based in Chicago. His work is driven by a commitment to equity in health and education. With EA, he has worked on the Shared Success evaluation, carrying out qualitative and quantitative research with small businesses and their workers across the United States. He has also conducted research with Salud Para La Gente, a community health center serving agricultural workers on California's Central Coast. That study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and run in partnership with UC Santa Cruz, looks at State Disability Insurance and maternal health among pregnant agricultural workers.

Blanca has more than 20 years of experience in financial inclusion, the MSME sector and gender. She designs and formulates projects, building the logic, results frameworks and instruments that hold them together. In workshops she co-facilitates, then documents and systematizes what participants contribute.

Alice is a specialist in inclusive insurance and financial protection. She designs microinsurance, parametric and climate risk transfer products, and supports insurers, MFIs and governments across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Her work covers product structuring, client value analysis, consumer protection, and building insurance into wider risk-management systems; her recent work in Ecuador produced roadmaps for integrating risk finance. She began her career at Lloyd's of London and was later Research and Innovation Officer at the ILO's Impact Insurance Facility. Today she is Managing Director of Three Fin Consulting, an EA partner, and Co-Chair of The Finance Innovation Lab. Alice studied at Cambridge University and the Geneva Graduate Institute and holds a Diploma from the Chartered Insurance Institute.

Johan leads EA's field coordination and client research in Colombia. He works with financial institutions on insurance processes and agricultural client engagement, and has contributed to diagnostics on climate-risk financing, inclusive insurance and digital wages. He is a co-author of the Landscape of Microinsurance reports (2022–2024), covering 37 countries, and has led qualitative and quantitative research on product design for vulnerable populations. He makes sure that what clients, loan officers and branch staff say reaches the design of the product.