Tukiya Kankasa-Mabula

Tukiya Kankasa-Mabula

Convener of the Expert Leaders Group at Graca Machel Trust

Dr Tukiya Kankasa-Mabula is a Lawyer by profession with a passion for women’s economic empowerment and women’s financial inclusion in particular. She is currently Convener of the Expert Leaders Group on Women’s Financial Inclusion in the Digital Economy in Africa under the Graca Machel Trust. Tukiya was previously Deputy Governor for Administration at the Bank of Zambia for 12 years until December 2019. In that role she drove efforts to close the gender gap in access to financial services and spearheaded a number of initiatives including getting gender mainstreaming into the Bank of Zambia Strategic Plan and the National Financial Inclusion Strategy; and development of a framework for collection of supply-side sex disaggregated financial services data.

Tukiya was the first Chairperson of the Gender and Women’s Financial Inclusion Committee, now Gender Inclusive Finance Committee of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), which oversaw the adoption of the gender work stream in all working groups and other organs of AFI, and the creation of the Women World Banking, Oxford University and AFI Leadership and Diversity Programme.

Tukiya is a member of the World Bank Group Advisory Council on Gender and Development; the UNECA African Women’s Leadership Fund Advisory Board and the Business Development Committee; and the Steering Committee of the Women’s Financial Inclusion Data Partnership (WFID). She is also Chairperson of the United Bank for Africa Zambia Limited; and the Caretaker Committee of the University of Zambia Council.


Tukiya’s first career was in academia where she taught commercial and business law as well as the Human Rights of Women and Children. She then served as Director of Licensing and Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission before joining the Bank of Zambia, initially as Bank Secretary (Chief Legal Advisor and Secretary to the Board which included the Bank’s communications function).

Tukiya was the recipient of the 2014 International Bar Association’s Outstanding International Woman Lawyer Award. She has a PhD from the University of London, LLM from Harvard and LLB from the University of Zambia.