Three Indian women win prestigious Cartier fellowship
Mansi Jain, Ira Guha, and Akshita Sachdeva have won the 2024 Cartier Women’s Initiative Fellowship.
Three Indian women have been awarded the 2024 Cartier Women’s Initiative Fellowship.
This entrepreneurship award is given to women change-makers solving the world’s most pressing challenges. Thirty-three leading entrepreneurs from across the world were presented with these awards.
From left: Akshita Sachdeva (Founder, Trestle Labs), Mansi Jain (Founder, Digital Paani), Ira Guha (Founder, Asan)
Three Indian women have made it to the list.
Mansi Jain, based in Delhi, is the Founder of , a software platform that enables wastewater treatment plants to manage their entire operations so that they can treat, recover, and reuse contaminated water effectively.
DigitalPani helps treat 90 million litres of water a day and has transformed the water infrastructure in nearly 50 units of India's top companies into high-quality and compliant facilities, according to a press statement. The awards were given by NITI Aayog and FICCI, and the startups received investments from leading investors globally.
Bengaluru-based Akshita Sachdeva founded to promote inclusive education and employment for individuals with blindness using its AI-powered technology, Kibo. The technology digitises, translates, and converts printed, handwritten, and digital content into audio in 60 languages.
Since July 2019, Kibo has made over 650 institutions inclusive and empowered more than 1.5 lakh individuals in 25 countries, the statement said. Trestle Labs was featured on Shark Tank India Season 3 and has received numerous national and international awards for its efforts towards making content accessible for all.
Ira Guha from Bengaluru is the Founder of . She designed and patented an innovative menstrual cup at the Harvard Innovation Lab to address period poverty and reduce waste pollution from plastic sanitary pads.
Asan has saved millions of dollars for rural households through its social impact programmes and has averted more than 100,000 tonnes of landfill waste, according to the statement.
Along with the Cartier fellowship, Asan also won an award from the UK government to develop an innovative period tracker app.
The Cartier fellowship includes financial support from the Cartier Women’s Initiative, an-in person social entrepreneurship programme with INSEAD business school, and human capital support to help the growth of these three businesses.
The awards ceremony was viewed by over 14 million people globally. Keynote speakers included supermodel Karlie Kloss, Cartier CEO Cyril Vigneron, Olympic diver Guo Ginjing, and writer and comedian Sandi Toksvig.
Edited by Swetha Kannan