Articles by Lalita Advani

Last week, 600 individuals — including a number of leading professionals from India who sacrificed their Holi, Easter, Eid Milad and/or Navroz holidays with their families – gathered in Philadelphia for the 12^th annual Wharton India Economic Forum. This conference was founded in 1996 by then-Wharton student, Vinnie Badinehal, now Managing Director at Merrill Lynch (the lead sponsor for the conference), who recognized the value of a shared dialogue on the opportunities and challenges in India, long before India was in the media spotlight.

What was perhaps most exciting to me, as an Acumen Fund team member, was that every panel - not just the development panel - talked about the need for more inclusive growth in India, to take into account the 70 percent of the population that lives in villages or the 80 percent of the population that still lives under $1 a day - to enable the provision of basic services like clean water, affordable healthcare, and education.

Tejpreet Chopra of General Electric in India, discussed the challenge – faced by all companies in India – of bringing down the price of their products/services to a level that is affordable to a majority of Indians. It’s certainly a challenge that Acumen Fund and our entrepreneurs also confront, and we think sharing knowledge of what works and doesn’t in these markets is key to overcoming the distribution and pricing challenges that stand in the way of people having affordable access to basic services.

Have you ever thought of a woman as an investment? Well, Goldman Sachs certainly does. Goldman Sachs has just launched its “10,000 Women” initiative, which will provide business and management education to 10,000 disadvantaged women, and will help build capacity for improved business education in emerging and developing parts of the world.

Like Acumen Fund, Goldman believes in the power of markets to transform lives and economies. The initiative’s focus on women’s business education addresses an unmet need with tremendous potential: More economic opportunity for women translates into healthier, better educated families that can benefit generations to come.

I recently attended the US India Business Council’s (USIBC)  32nd anniversary celebration in Washington, DC, which was attended by over 500 people and featured global business leaders, US companies who have a growing presence in India and industry-leading Indian companies. What was exciting was not only to see people crowded together to discuss India’s attractive landscape and GDP growth but to hear business leaders come back time and time again to the need to think about a more “inclusive” growth, one that includes the 75% of people who live in India’s villages and 80% of people who earn less than $2 a day in India, and have so far been excluded from this growth – an issue that we at Acumen Fund work to address on a daily basis.

Mukesh Ambani, who received the Global Vision Award, accepted it on behalf of his father, Dhirubhai Ambani, who started Reliance with $1,000 and a dream, and made its growth and profits available to the common Indian through the stock market. According to Mukesh, Dhirubhai believed in two things: (1) investing in innovative business models and (2) trusting in the talent of young people, who in his opinion held the key to making things happen. Today, Reliance is India’s largest private sector company, 1 in every 4 Indians in the stock market own Reliance, and the average age of Reliance’s 100,000 person workforce is 29.�