Ashok Alexander

Ashok left McKinsey to lead the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s India operations. He led the team that set up Avahan, an initiative aimed at stemming India’s growing HIV epidemic. In less than three years, Avahan had become the world’s largest-ever privately sponsored HIV prevention program. Avahan worked with groups most at risk to HIV – primarily commercial sex workers. The Lancet in 2013, credited Avahan with preventing over 600,000 HIV infections.[3] Alexander himself has said much of the credit for the reduction in HIV belong to the sex workers themselves.[4]

Ashok’s team took the business model behind Avahan to maternal and child health and infectious diseases in Bihar and UP. Over a decade, Ashok led the growth and expansion of the Gates Foundation in India, with grants spanning health, sanitation and agriculture. The grants portfolio he oversaw amounted to over $1 billion involving scores of grantee organizations.[1]

Ashok, for the past four years, has been engaged in building The Antara Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on delivering public health innovations at scale. Akshada is Antara Foundation’s flagship program working in maternal and child health and nutrition in Rajasthan, in partnership with the Tata Trusts and the state government.[5] Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and Ratan Tata take keen interest in this seminal program. The organisation has a team of diverse professionals drawn from business, public health and government, working from Delhi and field offices in Rajasthan. The Antara Foundation is mentored by Arjun Malhotra and Bill Gates.

Antara Foundation’s proposition is that delivery at scale is the biggest challenge in India’s public health. Product and service solutions are often well known. Delivering these at scale involves complex barriers of access, livelihood compulsions, social and cultural norms, gender and caste inequity. This requires an orchestration of initiatives on supply and demand sides, backed by data-based advocacy. In essence, this amounts to treating health delivery as a business problem. Alexander has said that as Antara gained experience, their approach became more relational and less corporate, looking to learn from the people on the ground.[6]