Maria Alexandra Castellanos

I am an economist who has built my career around advancing gender equality and social inclusion in infrastructure sectors. I was a full-time consultant at the American Development Bank, where I worked on gender equality in the energy sector. My main area of expertise is gender equality and social inclusion in infrastructure, including transportation and energy. In my role, I would carry out research and analysis to find entry points and activities to include women and minority groups in projects. I developed theories of change for inclusion of women and minority groups, and created KPIs to measure and evaluate the advancement of activities. I also followed up on projects during implementation, ensuring activities were well implemented, helping with bottlenecks, providing training to clients, and assisting with disbursements. I also handled reporting and closing of projects. Additionally, I carried out events and social activities for the department, such as women's awards for energy, conferences on infrastructure and jobs for women, and trainings on LGBTQ and race for staff. I consider myself very innovative. I started working on gender equality in the transport sector in 2007, when nobody understood the relationship between women and transport. I was able to talk about women's mobility as users of the sectors and as workers in rural and urban transportation. I continued this pioneering work in the energy sector, where I created an online course and developed all the content for a course on energy and gender to build a pool of practitioners and professionals able to include gender equality in their energy projects. My career path wasn't straightforward. I started with a background in business, working in a construction company in Africa, which gave me invaluable field experience in developing countries. Working as a woman in a very masculine environment helped me understand the difficulties women face working among men, as well as the possibilities and opportunities in different jobs. This experience was instrumental when I transitioned to development work focusing on gender equality.