Skollar 2005/06
Sitaramachandra Machiraju came to the Saïd Business School to take up his Skoll Scholarship with 17 years’ experience in the financial services sector and in community development. Before coming up to Oxford, he was leading a large microfinance programme at the World Bank supported poverty reduction project in India.
Sitaramachandra was attracted to Oxford as it resonated with his idea of organising a responsible business: “It was indeed a refreshing experience to find that each of my classmates had the soul of a social entrepreneur and had a penchant for relating almost every business discussion to ethics and social responsibility. Almost 50 per cent of the class was involved in social entrepreneurship either by choosing to do an elective course or carrying out a project in that area.”
At the Saïd Business School, Sitaramachandra led a team of students to carry out an Entrepreneurship Project on “micro health insurance”, which was rated among the best in the class and received the JP Morgan Prize. He opted for 15-month programme and completed his MBA with an individual project on “Algorithms for including the poor in global value chains – setting the stage for a new generation in microfinance” with the World Bank.
Having completed the Oxford MBA programme, Sitaramachandra is now based in Washington DC, consulting with the World Bank on their agriculture and rural development projects. His area of specialization includes microfinance, rural livelihoods, micro-enterprise development and agri-business. He is working on emerging business models for public-private partnerships, making the poor partners in profit and enterprise.
On the policy making front, Sitaramachandra is supporting United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in conceptualising and designing institutional mechanisms like ‘Livelihood Missions’ for eradicating poverty in high priority areas. He also provides pro-bono support to a several non-profits and microfinance institutions in the fields of business planning and strategy.