Alumni Profile: Siddhartha Chowdri ’05
More than a decade in microfinance and development work taught Chowdri the value of an education; in 2019, he put his MBA and a two-year urban education residency at The Broad Center in Los Angeles to use in a new setting: the classroom. The center is currently being transformed into The Broad Center at Yale SOM, which will continue to offer programs to bolster public education leadership.
This is the story of microfinance: you help someone get a loan to buy a cow, so she can get money, so she can send her kid to school. I started thinking about what people are valuing: They want education; they don’t want loans. Yes, the financial system needs to be more equitable, that’s a symptom of the problem. That’s not actually addressing the disease, which is that people are not just financially illiterate but actually illiterate.