Laura Foose is a Partner at Alternative Credit Technologies, a microfinance consulting firm. She has twelve years of experience in program/ policy design and advocacy promoting private sector development and poverty alleviation in developing and transition countries. Ms. Foose has formulated microfinance policies for the international donor community, in particular USAID and the multilateral development banks. As Secretariat of the Microenterprise Coalition for five years, Ms. Foose represented 27 microenterprise practitioner and advocacy organizations to donor agencies, the US Administration, and members of Congress and helped to draft the Microenterprise for Self Reliance Act that now governs USAID’s microenterprise program. She has designed microfinance projects and conducted evaluations of MFIs. She has led the Poverty Outreach Working Group at the SEEP Network for the last four years which is working extensively on poverty assessment and poverty downreach issues. Ms. Foose also moderates the Social Performance Task Force which is an international group of over 150 donors, investors, practitioners and raters interested in advancing transparency and the social performance of MFIs. She is a Founder and Executive Committee Member of the association “Woman Advancing Microfinance,” serves on the board of “Alliance of Students Against Poverty” a public awareness campaign educating students about poverty, and instructs graduate level courses on microfinance at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.