Prema Gopalan

Prema Gopalan (1955 or 1956 - 29 March 2022) was an Indian social worker who built Swayam Shikshan Prayog into a network putting rural women at the centre of disaster recovery, farming and community health. She held a master's degree in social work and an MPhil in sociology and research methodology, and in 1984 co-founded the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres with Sheela Patel.

Her method took shape in the reconstruction that followed the 1993 earthquake in Latur and Osmanabad in Maharashtra. Working with the state government over four years, she turned what had been designed as a beneficiary programme into one run by village women themselves, training them as samvad sahayaks, or community facilitators, across some 1,300 villages. Swayam Shikshan Prayog was established out of that partnership and she led it as executive director for more than two decades. She went on to work on recovery after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and floods in Bihar and Kerala.

From the late 1990s the organisation built networks of women's self-help groups, then developed a disaster management model and clean-energy enterprises, and from 2009 a climate-resilient farming model that was scaled across more than 500 drought-affected villages in Maharashtra. Her argument was that ordinary rural women, given training and a route to market, could shift from being recipients of relief to farmers, entrepreneurs and civic leaders; the women in the network are known as sakhis.

Gopalan was an Ashoka Fellow and a Synergos Fellow. Her work received the UNFCCC Momentum for Change award in 2016 and an Equator Prize from the United Nations Development Programme in 2017, and she was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the Schwab Foundation in 2018.[2][3][4]