Anuradha Ganapathy

Anuradha Ganapathy is a PhD researcher at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. She holds a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Anuradha made a mid-career shift into the development sector, and has been a researcher for the last three years in the area of digital development. Most recently, during her stint at IT for Change, a nonprofit based out of Bengaluru India, she was the lead for a project titled “Digital Economic Integration of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in the Global South” a multi country project anchored by IT for Change in conjunction with Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Sussex, and in-country partners. The study covered five locations - India, Kenya, Cambodia, Indonesia and Argentina, and examined how micro and small enterprises use digital technologies to integrate into global marketplaces. In IT for Change, she was also the lead on an EU (European Union) funded Participatory Action Research (PAR) project titled “Centering Women in India’s Digitalizing Economy”, where she worked with three social enterprises in India - SEWA, LabourNet, and Vrutti, to co-design gender responsive digital platforms / pathways for women workers in informal sectors including agriculture, garments, domestic work and beauty work. Anuradha’s research interests revolve around work and employment in the digital economy, specifically the adoption and impact of digital innovations on livelihoods in the informal sector.

Links to Anuradha's writings are available below:

Credit Scoring Algorithms for Financial Inclusion - A Development Perspective, which examined the development implications of using Big Data and machine learning tools towards supporting financial inclusion objectives.

Gender by Design - Principles for a Gender Responsive Public Digital Infrastructure, which outlined principles and pathways for maximising gender justice in digitally mediated delivery of public services.

Chapter titled "Fixing Platform Power" (Pg 72-80) in the volume "Empowerment or Exploitation: Global Perspectives on Women's Work in the Platform Economy", which examined the impact of the platform economy on the experiences of women workers.

Encoding Digital Technologies for a Feminist Social Contract, A Science-Policy Brief for the Multistakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs, May 2022 

Fintech Wild West, Who's duty to act? A media piece that unpacked the resource extraction strategies of predaory digital lending apps functioning as fintech innovations.