Dipika Chawla is a Principal Specialist with DAI’s Sustainable Business Group, where she manages a portfolio of projects providing advisory services to multinational corporations looking to drive sustainable economic growth in the countries where they operate. Her areas of technical expertise include entrepreneurship, (incubation, acceleration, access to finance), small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) development, youth employment, and gender integration.

Dipika works with companies to design, manage, and evaluate innovative and impactful programs that align with corporate strategic objectives. She has led program feasibility studies, stakeholder consultations, youth employment studies, and sector analyses. She has also designed and delivered content for startup bootcamps, business plan and innovation competitions, incubators, and accelerators, and has played a variety of advisory and senior management roles on corporate- and foundation-funded projects. As Team Lead for the Kosmos Innovation Center, she designed an innovative financing mechanism for disbursing seed funding to fledgling agritech startups.

Before joining DAI, Dipika worked for the World Bank researching public policy tools for fostering innovation in Asia. Prior to that, she worked for the Rainforest Alliance, an organization that works with agricultural, forestry, and tourism companies to promote sustainable business worldwide.

• M.S., foreign service, Georgetown University