Ethiopia: Meaza Ashenafi, a lawyer committed to women’s access to finance

Meaza Ashenafi is an Ethiopian lawyer committed to women’s rights. In 2013, she founded Enat Bank which is dedicated to financing Ethiopian women. She has also been the President of the Supreme Court of her country since 2018.

Meaza Ashenafi is an Ethiopian with an exceptional background. At the age of 17, she entered Addis-Ababa University to study law. She was the only girl in her class among 50 male classmates. In 1986, she obtained her law degree. She subsequently worked in the Ethiopian High Court as a judge in charge of criminal matters from 1989 to 1992. But in 1993, she decided to change her path when she realized that she had unknowingly convicted a man who was raising his 8 children alone with a derisory salary. 

In 1993, she joined the Constitutional Commission of Ethiopia as an advisor and helped draft the country’s first constitution. She advocated, in particular, for more rights for women and children. While working on the constitution, she traveled to The Hague where she was trained on human rights. There she met African women lawyers who advocated for legal reform and respect for the rights of African women. Back in Ethiopia, she founded the Ethiopian Association of Women Lawyers in 1995. The NGO opened legal aid centers in different regions of the country where nearly 100,000 women were accompanied. The association contributed, in particular, to fight against child abduction, domestic violence and to improve family legislation … As a lawyer, she also defended several women in cases of domestic and sexual violence as well as land rights …

Working for the economic empowerment of women

In 2005, she studied international relations at the University of Connecticut and in 2006, she obtained her master’s degree on « Women in Public Decision-Making ». Subsequently, she worked at the UN Commission for Africa (UNECA) where she was responsible for collecting, disseminating and sharing data and information on women’s rights and freedoms in Africa.

Following this experience, she worked from 2008 to 2011 with a friend on the creation of a bank to enable women to access capital for business creation. The bank was created in 2013 under the name « Enat Bank » with the aim of economically empowering women by giving them access to credit. At its opening, the bank had a capital of 75 million birrs, with 7000 shareholders of which 64% were women. During her tenure as Chairman of the Bank’s Board of Directors until 2017, she multiplied Enat’s profits by five, reaching 100 million birr. In 2017, the bank granted loans of 2.4 billion birr.

She left the bank’s board of directors in 2017. In November 2018, she became the first female Chief Justice of Ethiopia. She received several awards and honors, including the 2008 International Woman of Courage Award from the U.S. State Department. In 2005, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.