Ashok Alexander

Founder

Ashok Alexander is the founder of The Antara Foundation (2014)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare and women & children from New Delhi.

Ashok Alexander (born 5 May 1954) is an Indian public health practitioner and former management consultant who is the founder-director of The Antara Foundation, a non-profit organisation working on maternal and child health in rural India. He established it in 2013 after nine years directing the India office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

At the Gates Foundation he created Avahan, an HIV prevention programme that worked through and with sex workers and other groups at high risk of infection, and which became the largest privately funded HIV prevention programme yet attempted. A 2013 assessment published in The Lancet credited the programme with averting more than 600,000 infections.

Early life and education

Alexander studied at St Stephen's College, Delhi, and the Delhi School of Economics, and took a postgraduate management qualification at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

Career

He joined McKinsey & Company in New York in 1986 and spent about seventeen years with the firm, latterly as a director of its Delhi office.

In 2003 he left consulting to set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's India office, which he led until 2012. There he designed and ran Avahan, the foundation's Indian AIDS initiative, which concentrated on female sex workers, men who have sex with men and transgender communities across the states worst affected by the epidemic.

In 2013 he founded The Antara Foundation, which works alongside state governments to strengthen the delivery of maternal, newborn and child health services through the existing public health system, principally in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

His account of the Avahan years, A Stranger Truth: Lessons in Love, Leadership and Courage from India's Sex Workers, was published in 2018.

Recognition

A Stranger Truth was named the best non-fiction book at the Tata Literature Live! festival awards in 2019.[2][3][4][5]

The Antara Foundation

The Antara Foundation partners with government public health systems to improve maternal and child health outcomes, building the capacity of frontline health workers and using data-driven and digital tools to identify and manage high-risk pregnancies and childhood cases across underserved regions including Madhya Pradesh.

The Antara Foundation reports the following, on its own site: