Combining head and heart in giving decisions

I was walking with a friend at Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda Arts Festival when I learned about the organisation The Life You Can Save. That was when I first encountered Effective Altruism (EA). I was drawn to the idea of combining both head and heart in giving decisions, and was soon introduced to the organisation’s team. I went on to work for The Life You Can Save and led charity evaluation and partnerships. My work and our recommended charities inspired me every day.

Founding a charity

EA has deeply shaped my professional trajectory. What drew me to it was its insistence that doing good should be both deeply compassionate and rigorously analytical — caring about real outcomes while remaining ambitious about impact. This led me to found Setuwelt, a charity incubated through the AIM Charity Entrepreneurship programme and grounded in EA principles. Founding a charity felt like an authentic way to translate my values into action — pursuing outsized impact, guided by evidence.

Setuwelt: building bridges for global opportunities

At Setuwelt, we address the barriers to one of the world’s most powerful poverty-reduction tools — migration. Migration is blocked by cost, complexity, and gatekeeping. Our work is guided by a vision of a world where every individual, regardless of their origin, can safely and affordably access global opportunities.

Setuwelt runs migration scholarships and is active in India and Germany. Our scholarship programme enables low-income Indian youth to access German apprenticeships through language training, cultural support, mentorship, and employer matching. This pathway creates transformational economic mobility for migrants and their families — with each scholar increasing their nominal annual income by an estimated 16.8×. 

Meeting the German chancellor

A current success we are celebrating is the meeting of Setuwelt scholar Shanupriya with the incumbent German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. There, she was able to represent our programme and engage in exchange about the potential of talented young people from India who aspire to build their futures in Germany: