Archana Kannan — Chief Operating Officer

I have spent the last 15+ years working at the intersection of systems, people, and possibility, most recently as COO at Indus Action, where I helped scale our impact from enabling welfare access for 122,000 citizens a year to over a million. That arc, of moving from evidence to scale to drive systems change, is the kind of work that keeps me up at night (in the best way). My career has taken me from classrooms in Mumbai and Chennai as a Teach For India Fellow, to building the Global Learning Lab at Teach For All across 60+ countries, to negotiating state partnerships with governments in UP, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Telangana. What drives me is solving complex problems, the kind where the path from vision to impact is rarely straight. I love being the person who can hold both the strategic ambition and the operational detail: asking why we are not reaching the people we should, and then actually building the systems to fix it. I have had the privilege of working alongside donors and grantmakers who showed up as genuine thought partners, willing to fund for the long term and support programme design that prioritised sustained impact over short-term gains. That quality of partnership changed what was possible for the mission, and it is something I am deeply motivated to pay forward. I care deeply about the design of public systems, who gets included, who gets left out, and why. That has led me into increasingly fascinating territory: how technology is reshaping the relationship between citizens and states, who holds power in digital economies, and what it takes to ensure that transformation serves justice. I believe these questions are not unique to any one country, and that there is something valuable in thinking across contexts, learning from how different societies in the Global South are grappling with the potential and peril of digital change. I am now stepping into a new chapter, open to roles in philanthropy, strategic advisory, and programme design where I can bring practitioner rigour, systems thinking, and a genuine commitment to solving complex problems for a more equitable and sustainable future, across India and the broader Global South. If you are working at the intersection of technology, justice, and systems change, or thinking about how to build solutions that scale, while keeping those impacted at the centre of design, I would love to connect.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Social Impact Leader with expertise in education, technology, and systems change.

Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

Experience: 16 yrs 10 mos