Apoorva Baheti

I started my career in actuarial insurance pricing and quickly realized it was not for me. So I applied my economics and actuarial science degrees towards impact research instead, and reached J-PAL South Asia, and eventually their evidence-informed scale-up partners Pratham International and TaRL Africa.

During my MBA and MPP degrees at Yale, I’ve had time to think about how impact resists being perfectly fit into graphs and tables, and what are other ways to talk about it and create shared visions across businesses, researchers, governments, and nonprofits. I have also learnt that impact is best created when an initiative is close to the ground, led by people from the community, informed by the problem before the best practices.

I’ve been lucky that my work and studies have taken me to Nigeria, Zambia, Botswana, Kenya, Costa Rica, and Jordan – and I see how the challenges of changing structural social problems are similar across developing countries. This is great news, of course, because this means we stand in solidarity and can share solutions across borders.

I remain Indian at heart, and constantly think about the people who have helped me get here and how I can give back to them.

Connect with me on LinkedIn or write to me at apoorva.baheti@yale.edu