Community Building for Economic and Social Development - Red Dot Foundation

ElsaMarie D'Silva is the Founder of Red Dot Foundation (India) and President of Red Dot Foundation Global (USA). Its technology platform Safecity, crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public and private spaces globally. Since Safecity started in Dec 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India and abroad.

ElsaMarie is one of the W7 advisors under the German G7 Presidency. She is a 2020Gratitude Network Fellow, 2019 IWF Fellow and a Reagan Fascell Democracy Fellow, a2018 Yale World Fellow and an alumni of the Stanford Draper Hills Summer School, the USState Department’s Fortune Mentoring Program, Oxford Chevening Gurukul and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Leadership Program. She is also a fellow with RotaryPeace, Aspen New Voices, Vital Voices and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She co-founded the Gender Alliance which is a cross-network initiative bringing together feminists from various German networks including the German FFO’s GDL. She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women and has won several awards including Government of India Niti Aayog’s #WomenTransformingIndia award. In 2017, she was awarded the Global Leadership Award by Vital Voices in the presence of Secretary Hillary Clinton.

Her work has been recognised by the United Nations Alliance of Civilisations through the Intercultural Innovation Award, SDG Action Festival and the UN Foundation at the Solutions Summit 2016.

She is a co-editor and author of “The Demographic Dividend and the Power of Youth” published by Anthem Press on behalf of the German Federal Foreign Office’s Global Diplomacy Lab. Her latest book is She Is: Stories of Women Advancing Sustainable Development Goals in India.

She has penned articles that have appeared in CNN, Huffington Post, and WIP amongst others. She has spoken about her work at the Rotary International Assembly 2019, Aspen Ideas Festival, at TEDx MidAtlantic, UN Women, State Department, Vital Voices South to South Leadership Summit. She has been a panellist for World Bank, NDI, USIP, and SheThePeople and hosted a roundtable at the Bloomberg CityLab London 2015.

Prior to Safecity, she was in the aviation industry for 20 years where she worked with Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines. Her last portfolio was Vice President Network Planning & Charters where she oversaw the planning and implementation of 500 daily flights.