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EPISODE 60:
Ajaita Shah
Founder and CEO Frontier Markets:
Meet Her Where She Leads
Ajaita Shah is the Founder of Frontier Markets, and President of Frontier Innovations Foundation. Ajaita is a globally recognised leader in gender and digital inclusion, with over 21 years of experience working in rural India to build sustainable income solutions for rural women. Her vision is to empower one million rural women entrepreneurs by 2030, directly enabling access to essential products and services for 100 million rural customers.
Ajaita built and scaled Frontier Markets, which is India' s largest and fastest- growing AI- powered rural commerce platform that has transformed over 50,000 rural women entrepreneurs into digital storefronts delivering essential products and services, such as finance, clean energy, agriculture, health, and consumer goods. These women have used the Meri Saheli App to generate over $100M in rural commerce revenues and serve over 4 million underserved rural customers in more than 5,000 villages across 5 states of India.
Ajaita’s accolades include being honoured as the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year, CNBC' s Future Female Leader Award, featured in Forbes 30 Under 30, Fortune 40 Under 40, and most recently receiving the Ashden Award for Outstanding Achievement.
Ep 60. Ajaita Shah, Founder and CEO Frontier Markets:
Meet Her Where She Leads
Imagine the power of one million rural women entrepreneurs, impacting 100m underserved customers across rural India. Because when women lead, the world shifts.
That is the ambition at the heart of Frontier Markets.
In this episode, I am joined by Ajaita Shah, Founder-CEO of Frontier Markets and its sister nonprofit organisations, Frontier Innovations Foundation in the US, and the Saral Jeevan Foundation in India.
We explore how empowering women in rural villages across India has sparked a nationwide movement — unlocking economic opportunity, leveraging technology, and creating ‘last-mile’ solutions that genuinely shift gender norms and power dynamics, while building climate and economic resilience.
We discuss impact investing and blended finance, and explore how transforming an ecosystem starts with something deceptively simple: meeting women where they are.
We also talk about Ajaita’s personal journey moving from New York, where she grew up, back to her ancestral home in Jaipur, India; what inspired her to take on this quest; and what she has learnt along the way.
Recorded September 2026.
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