INTERCULTURAL

LEADERS

Red Dot Foundation

Intercultural Innovation Award (IIA)

ElsaMarie D’Silva is the Founder & CEO of Red Dot Foundation (Safecity) which is a platform that crowdsources personal experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces. Since Safecity started in Dec 2012, it has become the largest crowd map on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon and Nepal. ElsaMarie is an alumni of the Stanford Draper Hills Summer School, the US State Department’s Fortune Program and the Commonwealth Leadership Program. She is also a fellow with Rotary Peace, Aspen New Voices, Vital Voices and a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. She is listed as one of BBC Hindi’s 100 Women and has won Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award by Dusan Stojanovic (European Angel Investor of the Year 2013), Government of India Niti Aayog’s #WomenTransformingIndia award and The Digital Woman Award in Social Impact by SheThePeople. Recently she was awarded the Global Leadership Award by Vital Voices in the presence of Secretary Hillary Clinton. She is also the recipient of Gold Stevie Award for Female Executive of the Year - Government or Non-Profit -10 or Less Employees in 2016. She has penned articles that have appeared in CNN, Huffington Post, WIP amongst others. She has spoken about her work at the Aspen Ideas Festival , at TEDx MidAtlantic, UN Women, State Department, Vital Voices South to South Leadership Summit. She has been a panelist for NDI, USIP, 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.