A bridge between
those who have resources
and those who need them.
Nirmala A has spent over two decades on one side or the other of a funding relationship: raising the money, placing it, checking where it went, and reporting what changed. More than ₹200 crore has moved through programmes she built or led, across some 500 corporate and institutional partnerships.
Thirteen of those years were at Habitat for Humanity India as regional head for South India, creating corporate shared-value platforms and opening its corporate partnerships across the region. She went on to lead partnership development for South India at Oxfam India, returned to Habitat as director of institutional partnership development and CSR advisor, and then led business development and engagement at ChildFund India. Since 2024 she has been ChildFund International’s Asia head of partnerships, innovation and impact, across India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, and in 2025 she was also interim director for sustainability and business development at ChildFund India. From 2021 to 2025 she advised Technicolor India on its CSR programme, and she has advised CMCA on institutional growth and grant strategy since 2022.
From 2019 to 2022 she was country director, India, for Secret Projects Global, a UK social enterprise selling handmade products made by women’s enterprises. She set up its Indian subsidiary, trained 500 women in entrepreneurship across five states and raised share capital for the company. She has taken a ₹46 crore clean energy initiative for women from concept to funded programme, and built agroforestry and regeneration programmes of more than ₹45 crore per country in India and Sri Lanka.
She is a trained counselling psychologist, which shapes how she works with communities and with the teams that serve them and, she would say, how she handles a partnership conversation.
On the name. Her first degree was in physics, mathematics and electronics. A diode is the component that lets current pass in one direction and blocks it in the other. It is not a metaphor borrowed for a brochure but the thing she studied, and the clearest description of what good CSR ought to do.
She continues to lead partnerships, innovation and impact for ChildFund International across Asia, and to advise CMCA on strategy and institutional growth, building CSR DIODE alongside them.