Suhani Jalota

Founder

Suhani Jalota is the founder of Myna Mahila Foundation (2015)[1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, healthcare and livelihood from Mumbai.

Suhani Jalota is an Indian economist and social entrepreneur, and the founder of the Myna Mahila Foundation, a Mumbai-based organisation that works on women's menstrual health, employment and research in the city's informal settlements. She established it in 2015 while an undergraduate at Duke University.

Myna Mahila employs women from low-income neighbourhoods of Mumbai to manufacture and distribute low-cost sanitary pads and to run door-to-door outreach that encourages open discussion of menstruation, a subject widely treated as taboo. In 2018 the foundation was one of seven charities chosen by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to receive donations in lieu of wedding gifts, and the only one based outside the United Kingdom.

Early life and education

Jalota graduated from Duke University in 2016 with a degree in economics and global health. She subsequently studied at Stanford University as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, where she took a PhD and an MBA.

Career

Jalota founded the Myna Mahila Foundation in 2015. The organisation describes itself as a research-driven social enterprise whose aim is to increase women's agency and decision-making power, and it reports a reach of about 1.5 million women and a team of some seventy staff in India. Its programmes include Pledge a Period, which supplies menstrual products to girls from low-income households.

As an economist she uses field experiments to study the intersection of women's employment, health and agency, and how technology affects women's self-determination. She has been affiliated with the Stanford King Center on Global Development.

Recognition

Jalota was named one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year in 2016 and received a Queen's Young Leader Award in 2017. She appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list for social entrepreneurs in 2018. In 2020 she was the only Indian among three nominees for the Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award.[2][3][4][5][6]

Myna Mahila Foundation

Myna Mahila Foundation runs Women's Empowerment Hubs in Mumbai covering menstrual and reproductive health, digital literacy and flexible work. It measures its outcomes using randomised controlled trials and surveys.

Myna Mahila Foundation reports the following, on its own site:

Over 1.5 million women and girls reached through sexual and reproductive health education, clinics and community outreach at the doorstep
65,050 women and 950 men educated on stigma, taboo and biology via Teach Myna sessions
21,000+ women accessed health information and telehealth through the MHealth app
29,000+ female doctor consultations completed