Ajaita Shah

Founder/CEO
Frontier Markets

Ajaita drives vision, strategy, investments, and partnerships at Frontier Markets. She has been working with social enterprises and in rural India in microfinance, rural distribution, marketing, and access for 15+ years, and has committed to empowering rural women across the developing world through business models, financial inclusion, technology, data, clean energy, and inspiring women to push themselves beyond their societal boundaries.

Ajaita is the recipient of prestigious awards including: Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Women Transforms India Award, Digital Women of the Year, CNBC’s Women Entrepreneur of the Year, Loreal Women of Worth and more.

She is a Women’s Changemaker Fellow at Womanity Foundation, Dasra Leadership Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, and Cordes Fellow. She has spoken in many forums including COP 23, UN High Level Political Forums, UN SDG Summit, and more on social enterprise perspective from the field, to digital inclusion, to climate change to gendersmart investing.

Frontier Markets is a social tech commerce enterprise building access to last-mile products and services, to rural villages through rural women entrepreneurs called Saral Jeevan Sahelis. Present in 2,000 villages in India with 10,000 Digital Sahelis helping 700,000 customers adopt products and services in agri, digital inclusion, home appliances, clean energy solutions, since covid, essential services, and finance.

Ajaita serves on the board of Frontier Innovations Foundation and SHINE Invest.