Chetna Gala Sinha

Founder and Chairperson, the Mann Deshi Mahila Sahkari Bank
India

Chetna Gala Sinha has worked with people’s movements since the early 1980s. In 1996, she founded the Mann Deshi Foundation in Mhaswad, and in 1997, India’s first bank set up for and by rural women was formed. Today, the organization runs a Women’s Empowerment Programme that includes a dozen Business Schools for rural women and young girls and four Chambers of Commerce for rural women entrepreneurs. It also has a Community Empowerment Programme for Farmers that supports Water Conservation, Fair Trade and Access to Markets. It has a Sports Programme for talented athletes and a women-owned Community Radio which reaches over 100,000 listeners. The Bank regularly creates new financial products to support the needs of women micro-entrepreneurs. To date, Mann Deshi has supported over 400,000 women and plans to reach one million women entrepreneurs by 2022. Before she founded Mann Deshi, Chetna was involved in several Gandhian, farmers and feminist movements, including the Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) movement. Chetna has received numerous awards for her work including the 2005 Jankidevi Bajaj Award for Rural Entrepreneurship, the 2005 Ashoka Changemakers Award, the 2010 EdelGive Social Innovation Honors (Livelihood Category) and the Schwab Foundation’s 2013 Social Entrepreneur of the Year. She was part of the first class of Yale University’s World Fellows Programme in 2002-03. She is on the Board of the Rashtriya Mahila Kosh (RMK), the Women & Child Development flagship national programme to economically empower women. She is also a member of the National Committee for Promotion of Social and Economic Welfare constituted under Section 35AC of Income Tax Act, 1961. In January 2018, she has served as a Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.