Central Square Foundation: Ashish Dhawan

Ashish Dhawan is an Indian philanthropist who was born on 10^th of March 1969 in New Delhi. He studied in St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, graduated magna cum laude from Yale University, and completed his MBA from Harvard Business School.

When he started his career in 1992 he was the only Indian analyst working for Mergers Group at Wasserstein Perella & Co, which is a boutique investment bank on Wall Street. Later, he worked at a small equity firm McCown DeLeeuw & Co in California.

He returned to India in 1999 and co-founded one of India’s leading private equity firms Chrysalis Capital. After twenty years in investment management business in 2012 he left his full time position in Chrysalis Capital to found Central Square Foundation, a nonprofit philanthropic foundation that aims at ensuring quality school education for all children in India, especially focusing on transforming the education system, with a focus on improving the learning outcomes of the children with special attention to the children who come from the economically weaker section of the society, and ensure that they get the best and equal opportunity to education and in turn lead a better fulfilling life.

At Central Square foundation, they believe that the foundational learning of a child is crucial to better learning outcomes for all children in a school. They strongly emphasis on development of foundational literacy and numeracy skills by class three and believe that this initial foundation will help children improve their overall performance in the later part of their schooling.

In a very promising development Central Square Foundation along with London-based hedge fund Steadview Capital, Bill and Melinda gates Foundation and Google India have pooled in $40 million for the cause of improving the early stage education in India.

By: Madhuchanda Saxena

Content: https://www.livemint.com/Companies/OMnwLYzGCArRAdlblYPFyK/Ashish-Dhawans-CSF-closes-40-million-fund-for-early-educat.html