Zubaida Bai

Dignity by Design

Innovation for the people markets overlook

Zubaida built a company selling to women global investors insisted were not a market, then scaled the same insight across thirteen countries at Grameen Foundation. Drawing on the TED Talk that has been viewed over a million times, she shows why the customers companies call hard to reach are rarely the problem. The problem is that the tools for measuring value, and the methods for earning trust, were built somewhere else.

The Care Economy Is the Real Economy

Why investing in care is a growth strategy, not a women’s issue

As lead expert on care economy innovation with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Deloitte, Zubaida mapped what caregiving costs families and employers in savings, earnings, interrupted careers and health. Almost none of it appears on a balance sheet, which is why organizations are consistently caught out by it. Filed as a women’s issue, it lands in the wrong budget and off the agenda. Treated as a labor supply question, it becomes one of the defining business challenges of the next decade.

The Hidden Cost of Womanhood

What drives women’s mental health, and what workplaces and families can do

Zubaida built a company around a problem she had lived through herself, while raising children, in a country where few thought either was her business. She speaks candidly about the load women carry that no one has thought to measure, and about why the honest version of this conversation is more useful than another framework for balance. A keynote for International Women’s Day, wellbeing programs and leadership audiences willing to hear it straight.

Banking the Unbankable

Trust, risk and the customers the models wrote off

At Grameen Foundation, Zubaida led lending to women with no collateral, no credit history and often no formal identity documents. Repayment rates ran at over ninety percent. The models had been wrong about these customers for decades, not because the data was bad but because no one had collected it. A keynote for banks, insurers and financial institutions on where the same blind spots still sit.

When Two Missions Become One

Mergers, acquisitions and consolidation across the nonprofit and social enterprise sectors

The social sector is heading into a period of consolidation, driven by falling funding, donor fatigue and too many organisations chasing the same outcomes. Mergers are increasingly the responsible answer, and almost no one is prepared for one. Zubaida is currently writing a book on the subject, due for publication in late 2027, and this keynote draws on that research: what makes these deals different from commercial M&A, where they break, and why the hardest work has nothing to do with the balance sheet.

Additional Topics

Making the Invisible Impossible to Ignore

In business and in life

The through-line across Zubaida’s career, for marquee stages and mixed audiences. A keynote about what becomes possible when you look at what everyone else has learned to walk past: a product nobody thought to make, a customer nobody counted, a cost nobody priced, a person in your own organisation nobody asked. Best suited to annual kickoffs, cross-sector conferences and events where the brief is broad.

Three Generations, One Table

Intergenerational resilience and the pressures nobody talks about at work

Zubaida convened an intergenerational roundtable at TED during the pandemic, and the conversation surfaced tensions that have only intensified since: the sandwich generation carrying both children and parents, four generations now working alongside each other, and radically different expectations of what an employer owes. Re-anchored away from the pandemic, this keynote holds up well for workforce and wellbeing programs, particularly in fast-ageing markets.