In short, I am trying to change the paradigm of education for our low-income children. Your support will give me access to the tools and allow me to build with educational and business leaders to redefine "education" and bring it to the 72 million children without it and the billions more with the wrong definition of it.

I am currently the founder of The Teach Tour. The Teach Tour is a market research organization with a mission to shift the paradigm of education for the base of the pyramid’s 72 million children without access. It is a tour lasting 10 months and spanning 4 countries in South Asia, 15 countries in Africa, and 1 country in North America. The purpose of the tour is to both explore education at the root and to interview grassroots innovators creating products and services targeted at the base of the pyramid market. The end goal is to create a trend analysis on the failures and successes that have occurred and to use these trends to create opportunities and best practices for potential new entrepreneurs in both education and the development sector as a whole.

As the prior co-founder of MILLEE based full-time in India, I represented MILLEE in the Unreasonable Institutes fellowship program, which mentors social entrepreneurs to develop sustainable business plans and marketing strategies for their social enterprises. My endeavor with MILLEE was to create a for-profit enterprise that develops educational games on mobile phones to teach English literacy to children in rural India. Recently, I embarked upon a mission to uncover how and why we’ve failed to educate children worldwide through a research project called The Teach Tour in collaboration with Gray Matters Capital. I plan to take my market research to a commercialized design consultancy service by creating an IDEO for education at the base of the pyramid. Previously, I designed and implemented a mobile phone solution for the Ujjivan Microfinance Institution when I worked with Microsoft Research India’s Technology for Emerging Markets group. I am also a Starting Bloc and Dangerously Ambitious Sparkseed alum.

Going further back in time, after completing my undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon University, I joined Wall Street’s Merrill Lynch to build my corporate skills. During this time, I volunteered with Womens World Banking and discovered a passion for educating underprivileged but highly deserving women. That led me to quit my job and move to Cambodia to work with a non-government organization called Digital Divide Data. During my tenure with DDD, I developed a program called infinit-E with Transitions Global, a shelter for young women who have been rescued from brothels in South East Asia, to promote employability through English and Computer literacy skills . This led to my eventual obsession and passion for childhood education combined with the beauty of sustainable for-impact enterprises.

I hold a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and just moved from Pune, Maharashtra where I became a certified preschool educator with the Madhavi Kapur Foundation. I plan to spend 2011 in the US and Africa researching methods of bringing Early Childhood Education to low-income students in further depth.


I've been invited to Summit at Sea event taking place on April 8 - April 11. Summit at Sea awards females for their outstanding ideas, work and passion. Please lend a hand and support through whatever means you may- whether financial or physical or emotional, all support is welcome! Thank you!!