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For 450 million+ people in India's informal economy, progress remains fragile. Not because opportunities don't exist, but because they don't connect. A worker learns a skill but cannot find a job. An entrepreneur cannot access credit. A farmer cannot reach markets. The system forgets the individual at every transition
About the organisation
Samhita has impacted 17 million+ lives alongside 500+ organizations in 17 years. In 2024, under C4EC’s guidance, Samhita has been orchestrating a Livelihoods Acceleration Network, which connects Skills → Jobs → Enterprise → Credit → Markets → Social Protection across 100+ public, private, financial and civil society actors, with a goal of irreversible income growth for 10 million people by 2030. Some early successes from this orchestration effort have resulted in 5–50x multiple on philanthropic capital through initiatives like:
A blended finance facility (grants, subsidies, returnable grants, credit guarantee-enabled debt) delivering 50–150% income growth for workers, entrepreneurs and farmers.
Collaboratives backed by Gates Foundation, USAID, FCDO, Dell Foundation, UNDP, Google.org, S&P Global and Omidyar Network, unlocking contributions from 150+ funders.
Journey of Exponential Change
India has built world-class digital infrastructure through Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, etc. yet 90% of informal work remains underserved. The problem is structural. The same woman is a state beneficiary, a skilling trainee, a bank borrower, and an e-commerce seller, but these identities live in systems that do not recognise each other. The rails exist. The connective tissue does not: a trusted, portable livelihood record that travels with the citizen across every system.Samhita met C4EC at an inflection point. After years of large-scale CSR delivery, the team recognised that programmatic execution alone could not irreversibly increase incomes at scale. The question shifted from implementation to orchestration.
The Big Quest:
How might we orchestrate an open network that increases the incomes of 10 million people by 2030?
It reframed the challenge from gaps in delivery to failures of continuity, from missing data to missing interoperability, from lack of programs to lack of system memory. The constraint is continuity. This shifted Samhita's role from project manager to orchestrator, and from outputs to compounding outcomes, unlocking MacArthur Foundation support. The implications reach beyond India. Identity answers who someone is. Payments answered how they transact. What remains is how an economic life progresses and who recognises it. The answer is not a new system, but enabling what already exists to finally work together. India, with its DPI stack, diversity, and ecosystem readiness, offers the conditions to prove this at scale and provide a replicable model for the world.
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