Smita Deorah

At LEAD School, Smita is responsible for education research, product development, and capability building. As the Co-Founder, she has been instrumental in researching and developing the LEAD School system with extensive benchmarking with some of the best education systems of the world and contextualizing them for the unique needs of affordable schools in India. Today, LEAD School serves over 300,000 students across 800 schools – and rising to the challenges of the COVID-19 lockdown, LEAD School has become the largest online school in India.

Before co-founding LEAD School, Smita founded Sparsh, a non-profit working with the Govt. of Maharashtra in Anganwadis in Mumbai. She implemented a pre-school in a box solution in 16 Anganwadis around Mumbai to get students school ready and thereby reduce dropouts and low attainment. Prior to that, Smita spent 9 years in Procter & Gamble Singapore and India as a celebrated leader in Finance, Treasury and Strategy. 

Smita is a big believer in continuous learning. After graduating from Narsee Monjee College and completing her Chartered Accountancy, she has done Executive Programs at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Stanford Graduate School of Business. She lives in Mumbai with her family and loves traveling to different parts of the world.