Udaiti Foundation: Building a Five-Year Strategy from Scratch

Samyukta joined the Udaiti Foundation as its sole external consultant with a broad mandate: build a five-year organisational and program strategy for a nonprofit that had been operating for four years without one. The organisation's goal is to improve women's representation in the formal workforce in India, but it had not yet defined a clear theory of change, a target segment, or a path to scale.

She structured the engagement into three phases of roughly two months each. The first phase was discovery and landscaping: understanding the women's economic empowerment ecosystem in India, mapping existing nonprofits and government schemes, and identifying where major funders like the Gates Foundation and USAID were directing resources. She conducted secondary research alongside expert interviews, reaching out through the organisation's network and her own alumni contacts to speak with economists, nonprofit leaders, and private sector experts.

Mapping the Ecosystem and Finding the White Spaces

One of the core challenges was that nonprofits don't publish revenue figures, making it difficult to identify who was doing the most impactful work. Samyukta worked around this by speaking directly to major funders and sector experts to map the landscape. She then plotted existing nonprofits against the employment journey of a woman in India, identifying at which stages interventions were happening and where gaps remained.

Through this process, she identified that caregiving infrastructure, including childcare facilities and safe transport, was a severely underserved area despite being cited by approximately 80% of women outside the formal workforce as the primary reason for their absence. This finding became a central input into the strategy.

Pivoting the Theory of Change

A significant early realisation was that Udaiti's existing approach, working individually with private sector companies to audit and address hiring biases, was not generating systemic change. Only companies already motivated by the mandate would voluntarily participate, which meant the approach could shift outcomes at one company but would not move the needle at an India level.

Samyukta surfaced this finding to the leadership and board, and the team agreed to explore a different lever entirely: focusing on infrastructure-level interventions, such as childcare and transport, that could unlock workforce participation at scale. This was new territory for Udaiti, but the board, which includes senior partners from BCG and Bain, responded positively to the direction.

The second and third phases of the engagement are now focused on setting the ambition, defining the intervention pathway, building the impact measurement framework, and developing the governance and funding model for the next five years.