Swetha Totapally

Swetha Totapally is a Partner at Dalberg Advisors, a strategy advisory firm dedicated to international development. Based in Mumbai, she leads Dalberg’s Gender portfolio in Asia and seeks to make progress on important gender outcomes, especially for South Asian women. She also works extensively on ensuring that marginalized communities have access to government services and entitlements. Swetha has worked to advance a number of economic and social outcomes for women, including reducing the amount and share of unpaid work done by women, ensuring access to reproductive services, ending commercial sexual exploitation of children, identifying ways to support workplace opportunities for women, and informing data-driven policies that are designed to meet the needs of women. She is currently leading one of the largest studies on COVID relief which is analyzing the impact of entitlements through a nationwide survey of more than 50,000 households. This includes a deep dive effort to identify how government services can support women through the COVID crisis. Swetha has previously led the world’s largest and most comprehensive effort to understand users’ experience with Digital ID. Through a survey of nearly 170,000 households, she aimed to foster evidence-based discourse about Aadhaar and how to design and deliver good digital ID more broadly. Prior to Dalberg, Swetha was part of J.P. Morgan Chase’s investment bank, where she served as an advisor to financial institutions. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in Economics and Mathematics.