Roy Mersland

Roy Mersland is Professor of International Business and Development at the School of Business and Law, University of Agder (UiA), where he serves as Director of PhD education and Director of the Center for Research on Social Enterprises and Microfinance (CERSEM). He maintains a part-time professorship at Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and collaborates with the European Microfinance Platform and Centre for European Research in Microfinance (CERMi) in Belgium.

His academic credentials include a PhD in International Business from UiA, an MBA from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa Maria (Chile/Ecuador), and a Master’s in Business and Marketing from BI Norwegian Business School. Field experience spans over 20 countries across Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, including co-founding Ecuador’s Banco D-MIRO microfinance bank.

Mersland’s research centers on microfinance and social enterprise dynamics, examining corporate governance, financial inclusion, and development impacts through hybrid organizational structures. His work integrates macro-level institutional analysis with micro-level operational data, emphasizing gender dynamics, debt structures, and sustainability challenges in low-income contexts. Recent publications demonstrate methodological diversity spanning survival analysis, machine learning, and quasi-experimental designs.

Analysis of his 2023-2025 publications reveals dominant themes in savings group sustainability, international debt impacts, and gendered leadership effects. The research corpus shows increasing methodological sophistication through machine learning applications while maintaining strong field-based evidence from Global South contexts. Key trends include climate change adaptation in financial groups and nuanced examinations of the social-financial performance trade-off in hybrid organizations.

As Director of PhD education at UiA, Mersland oversees doctoral training while leading CERSEM’s interdisciplinary research agenda. His industry engagement includes chairing technology startup Checkin (www.checkin.no) and serving on the board of Kristiansand Kommunale Pensjonskasse, alongside advisory roles for Norwegian public and private enterprises. This tripartite academic-industry-policy engagement enables practical translation of research findings.

CERSEM serves as his primary research hub, fostering collaborations across UiA’s Alternative Finance Research Group. The center focuses on social enterprise scalability and microfinance innovation, with recent projects examining climate resilience in savings groups and governance structures for hybrid organizations. Mersland’s field network extends through active partnerships with microfinance institutions across multiple continents.