Rupal Ganesh

Shram Sarathi • India

Rupal Kulkarni is the CEO of Shram Sarathi – a pioneering financial services institution for seasonal labour migrants in India. Her work focuses on innovations that enable financial inclusion of highly excluded and vulnerable migrant communities. Rupal herself has lived and worked among tribal communities in rural parts of India. She currently oversees organisational strategy, product development, fundraising and research. She has over 8 years of development experience in India and Ghana. She has been an HSBC scholar at the London School of Economics, where she completed her Masters in Development Studies. She has an undergraduate degree in Commerce and is a university ranker from the University of Mumbai. She is also part of a distinguished cohort of social entrepreneurs at the INSEAD Social Entrepreneurship Programme. She was awarded the WeAreTheCity Rising Stars award in 2016, the ICICI fellowship in 2012 in India, and the Opportunity Collaboration fellowship in 2009 in Mexico for young social entrepreneurs. More recently, her company’s innovations in financial services also bagged the People’s Choice Award and placed third in the country at the MetLife Foundation Inclusion Plus competition in 2017. Rupal strongly believes in the transformative power of finance and the value of sustained community engagement in designing effective solutions. She is very passionate about her coffee and in her free time, she enjoys portrait photography.