Smita Rakesh

Smita Rakesh is the Vice President and Partner at Social Alpha where she leads the Climate and Sustainability mission. Social Alpha is a multistage innovation curation and venture development platform for addressing some of the most complex social and environmental challenges. Smita has also been instrumental in creating an international incubation centre (CEIIC), a unique partnership between the central government, private sector and philanthropy under Mission Innovation, which demonstrates India’s global leadership in making clean energy affordable and accessible to all. Smita has been deeply engaged with the global climate ecosystem for the last 14 years, contributing across a wide spectrum of institutional programmes and interventions in public, private and development sectors.

Smita is a post graduate in Environmental Sciences and is also a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow on Social Innovation. Passionate about catalysing large-scale and inclusive social change through responsible investments and market-based solutions, Smita firmly believes that an honest engagement with the primary stakeholders must include women and other on-the-margin populations, and advocates better contextualisation of solutions for community adoption, scale and deep impact.