Swetha Totapally
Asia-Pacific Director and Partner, Dalberg Advisors
Swetha Totapally is Asia-Pacific Director and Partner at Dalberg Advisors based in Bombay. She is a leader of the firm’s technology and gender equality practice areas. She seeks to identify when and how best to use technology to reduce inequality and make progress on important gender outcomes, especially for South Asian women. She has advised a wide range of clients including major publicly listed companies, foundations and philanthropic organizations, non-profits, and multilateral institutions on development-related issues.
Swetha is currently leading the world’s largest and most comprehensive effort to date to understand users’ experience with Aadhaar, India’s national ID system. This initiative aims to foster evidence-based discourse about Aadhaar specifically and how to design and deliver good digital ID more broadly. She is also working on a landmark report that will shed light on the potential of digital technologies to drive agricultural transformation in Africa in collaboration with CTA. On gender, Swetha has worked to advance a number of economic and social causes, including reducing the amount and share of unpaid work done by women, increasing opportunities to obtain paid work, ensuring access to abortion services and ending commercial sexual exploitation of children.
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, and speaks Hindi and Telugu.
