Jeroo Billimoria

Jeroo Billimoria is an Indian social entrepreneur who has founded a series of organisations for children, most of which began in India and were then rebuilt as international networks. She was raised in a family committed to social service in Bombay, took a master's in social work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and a master's in non-profit management at the New School in New York, and taught at TISS from 1991 to 1999.

Her first organisation, Meljol, was set up in 1991 to bring children from different backgrounds together on shared projects and to teach them their rights and responsibilities as citizens. It followed an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Bombay's various children's agencies to coordinate their work with one another.

Childline began as a field action project of the TISS department of family and child welfare in June 1996. Billimoria had been meeting children living at railway stations and night shelters, who began telephoning her at all hours; realising she could not answer them all herself, she designed a free 24-hour emergency number that any public telephone could dial. She staffed it with young people who had themselves lived on the streets, shaped its rules around what children said they needed, trained police officers, and placed medical booths in the areas that generated the most calls. Central and state government support followed: the service expanded from ten cities to forty-three by 2002, and Childline India Foundation later became the nodal agency of the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development for the 1098 helpline. Between 1996 and her departure in 2002 the service handled 2.7 million calls.

She then founded Child Helpline International, a network of child helpline operators that has since handled well over a hundred million calls across more than 130 countries. Analysis of those calls showed how much distress traced back to household poverty, which led her to found Aflatoun, which teaches children their economic rights along with basic saving and money management, and in 2011 Child and Youth Finance International, a coalition of governments, financial institutions and schools working on financial inclusion for young people. CYFI wound up in 2019 having handed its programmes to the OECD, the International Trade Centre, Aflatoun and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. She later set up the One Family Foundation and was among the founders of the Catalyst 2030 movement, since renamed Catalyst Now, which works on systems change towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

Billimoria is an Ashoka Fellow and a Schwab Foundation fellow, has received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and in April 2018 was appointed an Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau by the King of the Netherlands.[2][3]