The 24th Zahid Husain Memorial Lecture (ZHML) -the latest of the series - was held at Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA), Islamabad on May 2, 2023. This year's lecture was delivered by Dr. Asim Ijaz Khwaja on "Democratizing Lending: The Challenges and Opportunities for Financial Inclusion in Emerging Economies".

Dr. Asim Khwaja is a well-known economist. He is Director in Center for International Development and Professor of International Finance and Development, Harvard Kennedy School of Government; MBA Class of 1953 Visiting Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; and Co-Founder, Center for Economic Research in Pakistan. (CERP).

Dr. Asim's areas of interest include economic development, finance, education, political economy, institutions, and contract theory/mechanism design. His research combines extensive fieldwork, rigorous empirical analysis, and microeconomic theory to answer questions that are motivated by and engage with policy. He has been published in the leading economics journals, such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has received coverage in numerous media outlets such as the Economist, NY Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Al-Jazeera, BBC, and CNN.

His recent work ranges from understanding market failures in emerging financial markets to examining the private education market in low-income countries. He was selected as a Carnegie Scholar in 2009 to pursue research on how religious institutions impact individual beliefs. Dr. Khwaja received BS degrees in economics and in mathematics with computer science from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard. He was born in U.K. and lived in Kano, Nigeria and Lahore, Pakistan before moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He continues to enjoy interacting with people around the globe.

In his lecture, Dr. Asim touched upon several issues pertaining to financial intermediation including how financial intermediation should work and the implications of an inefficient financial system. He emphasized that given the testing times faced by both developed and developing economies alike. He stressed that while the policymakers face various macroeconomic challenges, at the end the underlying factors driving these challenging are rather microeconomic e.g. it is not the issue that a country or an individual borrows, the issue is how that country/individual use that debt more productively.

Dr. Khwaja emphasized that the challenges provide an opportunity for the policymakers to rethink the financial intermediation and the design of financial instruments, like lending, to improve the efficiency of the financial system. In addition, He highlighted the need for increased openness and transparency for central banks to collaborate with the researchers outside (sharing data and information etc.) for improvements in financial products and financial intermediation process.