Staring at the address in my notebook after my initial attempts at pronouncing Huis ten Bosch, in the Hague, the taxi driver remained unconvinced. “That’s where the king lives,” he informed me. Yes, I did have the right address – but I was visiting the other main resident of the palace: the queen.
Anyone considering Her Majesty Queen Máxima of the Netherlands as merely a royal consort would soon stand corrected, and few in the development finance world make this mistake in the first place. Queen Máxima has been the UN secretary general’s special advocate for inclusive finance for development (UNSGSA) for the past decade, over which time she has provided one of the highest profile voices to the financial inclusion cause.
