Region: India
Ayush Chauhan
Ayush Chauhan heads up a multi-disciplinary design and innovation consultancy firm, Quicksand, working at the intersection of business, development, and culture. He promotes design for social development by connecting the best practices of design, technology and behavior science with development programs to address the pressing and complex issues of social equity, public health, and education. In this capacity, he has worked with organizations such as Unilever, Google, World Bank, UNICEF, CIFF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, amongst many more, to design products and services that promote sustainability and quality of life for low-income communities. An entrepreneur, educator, and mentor, Ayush is also the co-founder of UnBox, the first…
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Ruchi Yadav
Ruchi Yadav leads and manages The Hunger Project's overall program portfolio in India, which includes strengthening and building the leadership of elected women representatives and empowerment of adolescent girls. She oversees strategic management, program design, policy, and operations. This includes engagement and dialogue with multiple stakeholders, including over 50 community-based organizations across India. Ruchi has close to two decades of experience in the development sector and the communication business. She has worked on women's rights and human rights issues in South Asia and South East Asia. Ruchi is vitally interested in the intersections of gender with politics, religion, caste, and class. She has also worked on women’s rights and gender…
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Abhik Sen
Abhik is a senior adviser with the United Nations on innovation and partnerships that can help accelerate sustainable development at the national and international levels. Previously, he was the first Head of Innovation and Partnerships at the Commonwealth Secretariat, the inter-governmental organization for the Commonwealth of Nations. In this role, Abhik provided capacity building assistance to governments, facilitated system-wide innovation, mobilized resources and managed the Commonwealth’s partnerships with other international institutions. He also launched and led the Commonwealth Innovation Ecosystem Program to foster digital transformation and sustainability, scale public innovation, support grassroots innovators and ignite partnerships between the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Prior to this, as Head of Policy and…
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ElsaMarie D'Silva
ElsaMarie D’Silva is an Indian gender activist and is the Founder and CEO of Red Dot Foundation (Safecity) and is President of Red Dot Foundation Global. Safecity is a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. Since Safecity started in December 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon and Nepal. ElsaMarie is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women and has won the Vital Voices Global Leadership Award, Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award, Niti Aayog’s #WomenTransformingIndia award and…
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Adrien Couton
Adrien Couton’s work focuses on bringing innovations to the global efforts and institutions supporting economic development. He is Vice President for the EMEA Region and for International development at Premise Data, a technology company leveraging big data analytics, a network of contributors in over 30 countries, and smartphone capabilities to measure economic and human development trends in real-time and guide major development players. Previously, he was a Partner and the Director of the Water Practice at Dalberg, a consulting firm specialized on global development. Earlier, he helped implement entrepreneurial solutions to water issues in both operational roles (as CEO of Naandi Water, the largest operator of community water systems in…
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Alexander Evans
Alexander Evans is a Professor in Practice of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. A career diplomat, he has worked as an advisor to the Prime Minister in 10 Downing Street, Strategy Director in the Cabinet Office, and Director Cyber in the Foreign Office. He has served as British Deputy and Acting High Commissioner to India and (briefly) Pakistan, led the United Nations Security Council expert group on Daesh, Al Qaida and the Taliban, and was a senior advisor to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke in the U.S. Department of State. He has also been the Henry Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress, a Senior Fellow at Yale, and…
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Rema Rajeshwari
Rema Rajeshwari is an Indian Police Service Officer with a distinguished career of integrity and passion. She has held various responsible and dynamic positions for nearly a decade. She started her career in the Police service as an Assault Commander with the 'Greyhounds', an elite special force, which undertakes high risk operations through jungle warfare against left-wing extremists. Working for people who are at the fault lines of the lethal intersection of society and violence, she has been instrumental in running successful operations against extremists, a women- and child-trafficking nexus, and other criminal activities. Rema has won accolades as the first female Indian Police Service officer from Munnar, Kerala State…
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Rahul Pandita
Rahul Pandita is a journalist and an author based in New Delhi. He is currently the deputy editor of the weekly news and current affairs magazine, Open. Earlier he was the opinion and special stories editor of The Hindu, one of India’s leading English-language newspapers. He has reported extensively from various theaters of war, including Iraq and Sri Lanka. In India, Rahul is mostly known for his reportage on Maoist insurgency in central and eastern India, and on the turmoil in Kashmir in northern India. He is the author of three bestselling books: Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir; Hello, Bastar: The Untold…
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Nachiket Mor
Nachiket Mor is a Visiting Scientist at The Banyan Academy of Leadership in Mental Health where he offers a week-long seminar on Health Systems Design. His current work is principally focused on the design of national and regional health systems. He was a member of the Indian Government’s High-Level Expert Group on Universal Health Care; a member of the Primary Care Task Force of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India, a member of the Health Commission for the Indian State of Himachal Pradesh, and a member of the Standing Committee on Health Systems Strengthening at the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, DC. Nachiket…
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Smita Rakesh
Smita Rakesh is a Partner at Social Alpha, an initiative to drive economic growth, social justice, and climate action through the power of entrepreneurship and market-creating innovations. As the head of Climate and Sustainability practice, she is also responsible for building and deploying a portfolio of science and technology innovations across sectors in climate change mitigation, adaptation, and ecosystem restoration for a socially and ecologically just transition. Smita has been deeply engaged with the global climate and clean energy ecosystem for the last 15 years, designing and implementing institutional programs in public, private, and development sectors. Smita is passionate about catalyzing large-scale and inclusive social change through responsible investments and…
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