A commissioned bank examiner and the founder of Kijiji Innovative Sustainable Solutions, Clara Rulegura Ford, MA, has built a unique career. With close to two decades of financial services and civic experience, Ford works diligently in community banking supervision to ensure compliance with established laws and regulations, ensuring these institutions continue to provide critical banking services and support economic growth that is essential for building stronger communities. Ford brings this spirit and her passion for nonprofit work to address key issues affecting the future growth of rural communities in Tanzania.
An Early Love of Public Service
Growing up, Ford was inspired by her economist father’s public service career, which included representing the Geita and Sengerema districts in Tanzania’s parliament for two decades. During this time, he served as a cabinet minister and held numerous key positions in various government agencies.
Ford hopes to continue this legacy of public service by making a real difference in rural communities in Tanzania, starting with Kasisa Village, where her clan has lived for over a century. She moved from Tanzania to the United States to pursue this goal, where she worked to complete higher education and build a career in banking and supervision. She supported undergraduate education through her work as a manufacturing specialist at Texas Instruments Inc. from 2002 to 2010.
An Education and Career in Finance
Ford completed a Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting at the University of Houston-Downtown in 2010. Later, she earned dual Master of Arts degrees in applied economics and in sustainability and development from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 2017 and 2019, respectively.
After completing her first degree, Ford joined JPMorgan Chase & Co. as a commercial credit underwriter. By 2017, she assumed the role of assistant vice president and commercial lending officer at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Just three years later, she shifted her expertise in credit and lending to banking supervision as a senior associate bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In October 2024, she earned her commission from the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Building Kijiji Innovative Sustainable Solutions
In 2020, Ford renewed her dedication to public service when she founded Kijiji Innovative Sustainable Solutions, a nonprofit organization focused on addressing poverty affecting rural communities in Tanzania. The nonprofit organization remains at the center of Ford’s work, while she continues with her passion for public service in her role as a commissioned bank examiner.
At Kijiji Innovative Sustainable Solutions, Ford is dedicated to developing customized solutions that address the root causes of issues to achieve lasting impact in poverty reduction. With a nonprofit board consisting of an economist, an architect, and various other professionals, the organization takes a multilevel approach to addressing poverty. Most notably, the organization collaborates with SMU’s Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity to foster sustainable rural development one village at a time.
Through this partnership, Kijiji Innovative Sustainable Solutions works with faculty and students in engineering and humanities to teach villagers various trade skills. This includes producing compressed earth blocks for construction as part of an income diversification initiative that is necessary to mitigate the impact of climate change to these agricultural and fisheries-dependent communities. This year, Ford hopes to promote an entrepreneurial spirit within her nonprofit, encouraging participants to collaborate and support one another in establishing small businesses based on the skills they have learned. With her unique expertise in finance, she hopes to lead her organization to success.
Ambition for the Future
Moving forward, Ford intends to retire from her current position as a commissioned bank examiner and dedicate herself full-time to her nonprofit work. She continues to be inspired by providing apprenticeship opportunities to girls in Tanzania. In 2020, she began purchasing land in her father’s birth village, with the goal of establishing a community center to carry out various sustainable development initiatives and to help supplement material deficiencies in public service provision to the local community.
