NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

By Baishali Mukherjee

Her research startup has changed the way data is collected and utilized for social schemes and programs by academics, policy makers, private stakeholders and the Indian government. Founded in 2012, with a strong presence across rural India, her organisation has worked across 23 states, over 4000 villages and interviewed over 3 million stakeholders with an indirect reach over 30 million offline people.

Meet Prerna Mukharya, founder of Outline India – a for-profit, social enterprise that stands for creating social impact through data. “Outline India engages in data collection – both quantitative and qualitative – to build impact metrics, to evaluate social programs and schemes. It helps CSR bodies understand who to partner with, who to measure the value add of their programs, to audit and assess social schemes and to determine scalability and replicability, explained Mukharya, who was featured on Fortune magazine’s’ 40 under 40 list for her disruptive work with ground level data in 2017 and again in 2018.

Photo courtesy of Martin Fisch.