Madan Padaki, Founder & CEO of 1Bridge and Managing Trustee of Head Held High Foundation was conferred with ‘Social Entrepreneur of the Year’ Award at 9th India CSR Awards 2021
Madan is a social entrepreneur working at the intersection of transforming youth,enabling entrepreneurial journeys &empowering social changemakers. His vision is that every youth is an empowered youth, every empowered youth is an entrepreneur & job-creator and every entrepreneur is a social changemaker!
An engineer from NIE Mysore and an MBA from SPJIMR, Madan has worked with Wipro, Infosys and Mphasis (Japan) – before being bitten by the entrepreneurial bug in 2000 when he co-founded MeritTrac as a pioneering idea in skills assessments and scaled it rapidly as India’s first and one of the largest skills assessment companies. FastCompany recognized MeritTrac as the Top 10 Innovative Companies in India in 2009.MeritTrac was acquired by Manipal Global Education Services, one of India’s largest education services company. In 2011, he moved to Manipal Education to head up Strategy, Innovation and International Partnerships, and transitioned out in March 2013 – listening to his heart to embark on a journey as a changemaker.
In 2009, he co-founded Head Held High Foundation, a non-profit that stands for human dignity. HHH focuses on initiatives for poverty eradication like Make India Capable, where a rural youth with no schoolingis transformedinto work-ready professionals and Global Action on Poverty (GAP)a platform that builds and supports Changemaking communities to eradicate poverty.Â
With a vision of transforming rural youth to be entrepreneurs, he founded 1Bridge in 2014 asa platform that empowers rural entrepreneurs to accelerate abundance of access, choice & convenience to rural citizens, leveraging technology. Today, 1Bridge is present in 70+ districts across South & East India and has over 6000+ rural entrepreneurs engaged in delivering services to rural consumers.
In 2018, he co-founded Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), a network that aims to catalyse large-scale job creation by bringing together Government, Businesses & Civil Society organisations to work collaboratively on igniting a mass entrepreneurship movement
Partnering with other Education leaders, Madan is also a co-founder & Director of Sylvant Advisors. Sylvant invests and supports education entrepreneurs, and has a group of 20+ ed-tech companies like Lodestar, Littlemore, PALGenieGuruG, EntLogics, KopyKitab, etc.
Since 2018, he has served as a Strategy Advisor to UNICEF India for a large initiative on youth empowerment called YuWaah and works closely with the UNICEF/YuWaah team.
As a part of the Governing Council of #CovidActionCollab, he plays an active role in driving the economic resilience impact canvas for the Collaborative. He is an activemember of Governing Council of TiE Bangalore and Advisory Board Member, Youth for Seva. He had also served as a Senior Advisor to Tata Trusts between 2015-2016.
Madan is a sought-after speaker at various conferences around the world and has shared his innovative ideas & thoughts at prestigious forums like TEDxIIM Bangalore, TEDxGateway, INK Conference, etc. He was also invited by Prime Minister Modi to share his ideas at the Champions of Change Conclave in 2017
