Leading with Care: How Women Around the World are Inspiring Businesses, Empowering Communities, and Creating Opportunity

Bringing Health Care to Their Doorstep

On first glance, Sumo appears to be an ordinary Indian woman living in a remote Indian village. To reach her isolated community of Irukpal, you’d have to drive two hours from the nearest city in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. Then when you’d arrive in what appears to be the middle of nowhere, you’d find yourself in a village that provides meager existence to the several thousand who live there.

Camouflaged by lush forest land, communities like Irukpal blanket the state’s 146 counties, providing home for more than 18 million Indians. Chhattisgarh, India’s most culturally diverse state, is peppered with rural tribes that account for one-third of its inhabitants. The remaining nontribal communities ...