Hilda A. Amenyo

I would attribute my success to foundations and education for girls. When I was growing up, it became very popular to encourage girls to go to school for much longer than it used to be before my time, so that really helped. And then the female mentors that went ahead were trailblazers and kept encouraging me to reach for higher. So I've always been surrounded by women who have also broken barriers. That support system and those role models made all the difference in my journey.

The best career advice I've ever received, and the most pivotal, has been that there's just no limit to what I can achieve. That has kept me going. The limit is in your mind, and as soon as you take it out of your mind, you can keep going, keep achieving. This mindset has been fundamental to my career progression and willingness to take on new challenges.

I would say to have unshakable self-belief and then confidence in the field. Even though sustainable finance is new and still has a lot of opposition, especially politically, it has a lot of potential to impact the next generation. So you need to just have that unshakable self-confidence in yourself and keep speaking up wherever you go about it, because it's going to become the trend, but probably in many more years to come. Don't let the current challenges discourage you from pursuing this important work.

In the field, the biggest challenge is geopolitical, and also very little knowledge of the potential of the field. Currently, it's still quite niche, even though it's become much more popular than it was three or even five years ago. But we still have the difficulty of people understanding that we can do financial products that would actually help the environment and help people. It doesn't always have to be profit, or only have to be profit-motivated. It can be designed in such a way that it does both. It has a three-prong approach: it's helping people, also profitable, and also sustainable for the environment. So the most difficult thing so far is still getting the word out there that this is possible, this is doable.

I treasure the value of resilience, because I believe that life is difficult, and so you need to really be tough and resilient to survive the different storms. And then I would like to do things excellently, so I do have as a personal goal to always make sure that I give of my best and to do it very well. At the core of all that is the ability to also make sure that I'm giving something back, no matter how small. For example, my work with STEM students is to help kids realize that even though I didn't initially start in STEM, I started in business, you can always branch off into something like STEM if you feel that it aligns more with where you're trying to go. I do enjoy going to the high schools and even middle schools to talk to kids about my career path.