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Ashok Alexander

Founder--DirectorAntara Foundation

Biography

In 2003, Ashok left a long career in McKinsey, to establish an HIV prevention program (‘Avahan’) for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with the goal of stemming the growth of HIV in India. Avahan soon became the world’s largest HIV prevention program, working in six states with a collective population of over 300 million. Avahan used business thinking to achieve scale, working in partnership with almost ten thousand sex workers. The Lancet in 2013 estimated that the program averted over 600,000 HIV infections.

In 2014 Ashok set up the Antara Foundation (TAF), to apply the learnings from Avahan to maternal and child health delivery at scale. In 2018 the state government decreed that key TAF’s innovations be rolled out to every village (46,000 in total) in the state of Rajasthan. Currently, Antara serves almost 400,000 women, in nine districts of Madhya Pradesh, a state that accounts for more than 12% of India’s under-5 deaths.