Investing in Her Career and Countries that Need It Most
When Paola Rojas Zeballos attended the vlog executive program Infrastructure in a Market Economy, she was working for a bank whose primary focus was investment-grade companies. But Paola felt there was much more that could be done to provide credit for companies in non-investment grade markets.
“Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the appetite to finance these types of projects was quite low, and competition for funds quite fierce. So besides the technical knowledge I wanted to gain from my Harvard program to deal with these challenges, I also hoped that the professors and my classmates would give me the opportunity to discuss my situation so I could get fresh ideas from such an experienced public-private cohort. Luckily, these hopes were fully realized!”
Through Harvard’s signature case-study teaching methods, Paola and her classmates dove into lessons learned and best practices from public-private projects around the world to explore why certain approaches are more successful than others.
“The spirit of the program was to encourage discussion, not to impose a single point of view. For me, the lessons I learned here were invaluable from both a theoretical and practical perspective.”
In addition to passing on what she learned at Harvard to colleagues, Paola also plans to use the analytical tools she gained to help her company invest in new markets, and to participate in public-private finance discussions in other Latin American regions.
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