Shilpa Rao

Shilpa Rao is a Development Finance specialist with nearly two decades of experience working at the intersection of financial inclusion, gender equity, and digital public infrastructure. She has led large-scale strategy, product innovation, and policy programmes across the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH), IFC - World Bank Group and Jana Small Finance Bank, partnering closely with financial institutions, multilaterals, mission-driven enterprises and academia.
Currently, she is an Independent Freelance Consultant. She supports global and national organisations on projects spanning financial inclusion, digital innovation, financial resilience and gender-intentional product design. Her recent work spans advisory roles with Accion, Dalberg Advisors, PayNearby, and the Priority Sector Lending Association of India, where she guides programme design and expansion, research frameworks, field insights, and strategic decision-making.
Previously at RBIH, Shilpa helped design and setup Swanari Programme, a unique regulator-led national programme on gender-intentional finance. She has built pioneering DPI-enabled credit and savings solutions, launched a digital SHG credit linkage program, and helped create a blueprint for a one of its kind gender-disaggregated financial data platform.
Shilpa holds an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics as a K.R. Narayanan and Ratan Tata Scholar. She is happiest in the complex and messy - combining rigorous research, systems thinking, and deep ecosystem experience to deliver insights and solutions that unlock socio-economic change at population scale.