Nikhita Nadkarni

Nikhita has joined the Acumen India team as Program Lead for Agriculture and Workforce. Her role involves working closely with Acumen’s Development & Partnerships team, Strategy and Insights team as well as the India Portfolio team to bring relevant partners to support in accelerating the impact of Acumen’s work in India in Agriculture and Workforce Development and to share learnings across stakeholders.

Prior to Acumen, Nikhita led the Livelihoods & Prosperity Portfolio at Social Alpha, an early-stage innovation curation and venture building platform supporting the “lab-to-market” journey of high impact, innovative science and technology start-ups. She was responsible for designing the investment strategy, pipeline curation, due diligence & investments, and portfolio management. She was also responsible for program development and fundraising for some of the flagship programs in agriculture & allied, skilling & employability sectors.

Nikhita began her career as a Management Consultant at EY where she worked on strategic and operational challenges faced by clients in the financial services sector. Fueled by her passion to make a difference in the lives of marginalized communities, she transitioned to Tata Trusts, India’s oldest private philanthropic organization, to set up the Monitoring & Evaluation framework to strengthen evidence creation, project monitoring, assessment and learning. She later went on to initiate and manage the Data-driven Governance portfolio, working closely with several state and district-level government machinery to create a culture of using data for effective planning and implementation of developmental programs and social security schemes.

Nikhita holds a Masters in Business Administration from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford (UK), a Master’s in Commerce from Mumbai University (India) and is a Chartered Global Management Accountant from CIMA (UK).