Our Networks

Addressing increasingly complex challenges, whether rapid urbanisation, climate change or a global pandemic requires leaders to apply new thinking and solutions that often cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries. The expertise required to address them is rarely contained within one organisation alone. A core part of our approach is to act as a backbone organisation, carefully curating a global and local network of cross-sectoral expertise that can be assembled on demand.

This approach has its genesis in the Covid-19 pandemic when we realised for the first time that our in-house expertise was not enough to respond to a crisis of this magnitude. Within two weeks of the first lockdowns, we rapidly assembled a global task force of 165+ experts ranging from epidemiologists, supply chain experts and venture capitalists to experts in social and crisis communications. With our team providing implementation support, we were able to support more than 12 state governments in India on their Covid-19 response, ranging from designing state-wide communications campaigns to helping run some of India’s earliest and largest serological surveys.

We are agile by design. Given growing global uncertainty and complexity, we prioritise curating and convening a network of trusted experts who can provide specialised expertise as situations demand. We act as systems integrators, to drive transformative change by aligning diverse actors, resources, and institutions to create collective impact across ecosystems and geographies

Convenings

Convenings are at the core of our network approach. Our convenings are designed to help conceptualise new development agendas and build consensus and cross-sectoral coalitions amongst our partners across government, business, academia, philanthropy, and civil society.

Artha Conversations are carefully curated 30-person roundtables designed to foster free and frank deliberation around policy challenges. Over the years, we have hosted a wide range of speakers including academics like Dr. Vasant Dhar of New York University and Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics, senior Indian policy makers including Supreme Court judges, the former Chief Statistician of India, senior NITI-Aayog officials; and practitioners like Leslie Maasdorp, former Chief Financial Officer, New Development Bank, and Junaid Kamal Ahmad, the former India Country Director of the World Bank.

Since 2016, we have hosted The Artha Retreat as a curated, completely closed-door event for 80-100 attendees in Kochi. Artha Dialogues bring together some of the most thoughtful people across government, academia, business, politics, the media, philanthropy and civil society to discuss India and the developing world’s most critical development challenges. Notable participants have included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair; the former finance minister of Brazil and CFO of the World Bank, Joaquim Levy, academics like Dr. Lant Pritchett of Oxford University and Dr James Robinson of University of Chicago, among others.