Michael and Susan Dell Foundation Invests $200 M in Education, Livelihood and Microfinance in India

Geeta Goel is a well-known face that has been representing the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation across three countries. These are: US, India and South Africa. In India she manages the foundation’s operations so as to transform the lives of urban low-income communities through improved education, livelihoods and financial inclusion.

In her role, Geeta manages the strategy and implementation of the foundation’s work in India in mainly two important areas which are Education and Family Economic Stability. She has been working as the country head for the past 11 years now. Since then, the organisation has made various investments in the area of early-stage social enterprises. The organisation has made an investment equal to $200 million across various sectors in India like Education, Livelihood, and Microfinance. In an interview with Yourstory, Geeta stated that leaving her corporate life and joining the social space worked out so well for her. She described that what she loves the most about the development space is the fact that she is able to actually live and observe the change in a space like this. As a responsible and impactful sector, she explained that their job is to bring about change not just in the life of one person but in the lives of the society at large. She believes that impact investment is a wonderful tool that is capable of impacting lives at a very large scale. She further stated that the three factors that play a key role and keep her going are: on the ground and human impact, continued sustainability. She briefed that the organisation wanted to render help through capital to these companies in the form that they needed and not in the form in which the company wanted. Resultantly, the organisation initiated investments in early stage companies in the form of grants, accelerator programmes, seed funding and others. Although, the investments in the education and livelihood sector have always been highly paying all over India, but urban microfinance is a tricky area, stated Geeta. In the year 2006, less than 5% of the microfinance market was urban. There are a lot of reasons because of which the organisations have stopped investing in this area such as the lack of clarity, with loan takers migrating to other areas as well. In order to address this issue, Dell foundation decided to invest in seven small-scale startups in the urban microfinance space between the years 2006 and 2009 to establish a strong microfinance sector through equity and grant. The initial investments by the Dell foundation were in microfinance institutions such as Ujjivan, Janalakshmi, Swadhar, and Arohan, among others.

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://yourstory.com/2019/01/geeta-goel-michael-susan-dell-foundation/