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Kendall Mau, MBA ’76, spent a lot of time locked in his house during the
month he was held hostage by sympathizers of Nicaraguan Sandinista
revolutionaries in Costa Rica. “The house was surrounded by gunmen and
protesters. People were lined up on the runway of the banana plantation’s
airport so our food and mail supply planes couldn’t land,” Mau relates
cheerfully. “It was a difficult time.”
But since it wasn’t the most difficult thing he’d ever done—not by a long
shot!—Mau took it all in stride. Mau’s life story reads like a business-school
version of “Indiana Jones.” His personal and professional journey has taken him
from the Peace Corps to the top ranks of a multinational corporation and finally
back to helping others as an expert in creating microfinance organizations,
which provide high-quality financial services to low-income clients in the
developing world. Now he is giving Smith students the benefits of that expertise
as well.
Mau worked in his father’s credit unions in California and Hawaii all through
his teenage years, so he was an experienced loan officer by the time he
graduated from college. Filled with enthusiasm, he joined the Peace Corps and
took his financial expertise into the small communities of Senegal, Africa, and
Panama, Central America, to build local credit unions.
When Mau returned to the United States a few years later, he also returned to
the corporate world. While working with a consulting firm in Gaithersburg, Md.,
Mau came to the University of Maryland to pursue his MBA, intending to build a
career in consulting.
But after a few years he found himself itching for adventure again. On his
30th birthday he answered an ad that read “Looking for MBAs with passports,” and
shortly thereafter was accepted into Castle & Cooke’s Dole Brand fast-track
management training program, a highly desirable position in the fast-paced
multinational organization. Before Mau knew it he was back overseas, living the
corporate high life in such far-flung places as Colombia, Haiti and Central
America.
It was while working for Castle & Cooke in Costa Rica that he was held
hostage—not just once, but twice. And eventually Mau came to realize that a
corporate career no longer held any allure for him. “I finally decided I don’t
belong here,” says Mau. “I decided that this wasn’t what I wanted to do with my
life.”
But Mau isn’t the sort of person who can just take it easy. He returned to
finance, helping to turn around the faltering Silicon Valley Federal Credit
Union while studying for his PhD. That, in turn, led him to the world of
non-government organizations (NGOs), where he found that his unique combination
of global experience, micro-lending know-how and financial expertise was again
in high demand. For a number of years he volunteered on financial consulting
projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development
(USAID) throughout central Asia and Africa, working in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Azerbaijan, Armenia, Uganda, Nicaragua, and eventually back to Senegal.
Today Mau is CFO and COO of Prisma Microfinance, a privately owned credit
union that operates in Nicaragua and Honduras. The company provides small loans,
sometimes as tiny as $50 or $100, to help with enterprise development, or simply
as consumer loans to help people purchase a refrigerator or washing machine, or
add another room to their house. This earns him the ire of local strongman store
owners, who make their money by charging usurious interest. Occasionally there
are threats and angry fist-shaking, but for a man who’s been held hostage, it’s
really no big deal.
Now Mau’s unique combination of experiences in both the corporate and
non-profit worlds is going to be of unique benefit to Smith students. He hopes
to offer internships to undergraduates in Honduras with Prisma Microfinance and
perhaps offer his expertise to the Dingman Center’s social responsibility
venture program.
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