The Convergence Foundation
Major initiatives & programmes
Urban Development Initiative
Flagship initiative within the Economic Growth team addressing core bottlenecks in city planning, business approvals, governance, and finance.
Evidence-Based City Benchmarking Frameworks
Developing diagnostic tools and indicators to evaluate and compare city-level regulatory efficiency and administrative performance.
Catalytic Grantmaking & Public Goods Incubation
Providing ongoing financial, strategic, and operational support to emerging non-profits, programs, and digital public goods.
About
The Convergence Foundation is a New Delhi-based philanthropic organisation founded by Ashish Dhawan, investor and former Managing Partner of ChrysCapital, who left private equity after two decades to work full-time in India's social sector. TCF operates as a systems-level funder and institution builder, working on the conviction that rapid and sustained economic growth is the most powerful lever for improving human well-being in India. Its model is built around co-creating and nurturing high-impact institutions that work at the intersection of policy, state capacity, and market forces to unlock population-scale change.
TCF currently supports a portfolio of 25 organisations spanning economic policy, education, skilling, labour mobility, governance, legal reform, science and technology, and philanthropy infrastructure. It operates across 13+ states through government partnerships, and has recently signed a three-year strategic partnership with the Bihar government's Planning and Development Department to advance investment, tourism, governance reform, and human capital development.
Work areas include:
Accelerating Economic Growth: TCF works to foster an attractive investment climate, boost exports of goods and services, develop cities and regions as growth engines, and advance science and technology. Its Mission Economic Growth video series brings together senior policymakers and economists including Amitabh Kant, Vini Mahajan, and Manish Sabharwal to surface reform levers across manufacturing, skilling, labour mobility, and tourism.
Enhancing Human Capital: TCF supports work on improving education quality, skilling, overseas employment and labour mobility, and women's economic empowerment, recognising these as foundational to India achieving its Viksit Bharat 2047 goals.
Advancing Development Enablers: TCF builds organisations that strengthen state capacity, catalyse population-scale social impact, and deepen India's strategic philanthropy ecosystem, including through Accelerate Indian Philanthropy (AIP), which it co-founded.
Portfolio organisations include: Central Square Foundation (school education), CEGIS (state capacity), Prosperiti (women's economic empowerment), Rocket Learning (early childhood), NCAER (economic research), GATI Foundation (overseas employment), Foundation for Economic Development, Air Pollution Action Group, India Leaders for Social Sector, TrustBridge, and others.
TCF is a strong fit for senior professionals who want to work at the highest level of systems philanthropy and policy engagement in India, contributing to institution building and reform efforts that operate at state and national scale.