The Annual Sankalp Summit is being held in Mumbai and we spoke to the director and co-founder of this first global platform, Aparajita Agrawal
Sankalp Forum is the first platform globally that has social enterprises at its core and under its activities they organise the Annual Sankalp Summit in Mumbai. This summit sees participation from more than 1000 global delegates. Aparajita Agarwal, director and co-founder of the forum spoke to us about it all. Excerpts from an interview…
You head the world’s largest social enterprise and impact investing platform – Sankalp. How did that come about?
I started working with Intellecap (the convener of Sankalp) nine years ago, when the company was just an idea in the Founding Team’s head. We wanted to bring about market-based approaches into the development world. We wanted to bring about a paradigm shift in the way social development and social innovation was done in India. It took us four years of rigorous work at Intellecap with investors, entrepreneurs, financial institutions, development agencies and government agencies, to identify the critical gap that existed between capital providers (funders) and capital seekers (enterprises). Sankalp Forum was really born out of that intent. We launched it in 2009, as the platform that will connect social enterprises with impact investors. For me personally, I started out on advisory projects around knowledge and capacity building in social enterprises and livelihoods space and it was a natural progression to take lead in building Sankalp Forum. Also, I have my bearings in this space for the past 13 years, having done my management focused on livelihoods and natural resources management.
