Guest blog by Richa Mukherjee, IPP ’25
After practicing public policy as a professional for 15 years, I decided to pursue it more formally as a subject from the Harvard Kennedy School’s IPP Class of 2025. This turned out to be a very insightful and an experience full of learning. The learning journey at HKS gave me comprehensive insights into addressing complex societal challenges, particularly as demonstrated through the digital financial inclusion case study.
Coming from a country like India, where there is still a massive lack of digital inclusion and all the citizens are not fully included in the mainstream digital financial ecosystem, I therefore decided to, work on the implementation policy challenge of Digital Financial Inclusion in India: The Gender Gap Challenge.
To give some background -India, with its vast geographic expanse, is experiencing remarkable growth in digital payment adoption, propelled by strategic government policies emphasizing transaction speed, convenience, and security. However, beneath this progressive veneer lies a significant disparity. Despite comprehensive government initiatives, large segments of the population remain digitally underserved, particularly in rural communities and economically disadvantaged urban areas. Women, as a demographic group, are notably absent from this digital financial revolution.
This imbalance has created an asymmetric economic development pattern where India cannot fully harness digitization’s potential benefits. A substantial portion of the population remains digitally marginalized, with gender inclusion representing a particularly distant goal.
As a payment and fintech organization facilitating e-commerce transactions, recognizes its responsibility to advance financial inclusion across all population segments, especially underrepresented groups like women. This aligns with PayU’s business objectives of promoting universal digital literacy.
The most pressing challenge in this landscape is addressing the systematic financial exclusion of women from India’s digital economy.
My key takeaways from the IPP course are that the course emphasized the critical importance of understanding root causes by identifying systemic barriers within societal, cultural, and economic structures. This involves disaggregating data to uncover disparities within subpopulations and designing interventions that are specifically tailored to their unique needs and contexts. A fundamental learning is that effective policy implementation requires deep stakeholder collaboration, engaging multiple layers of government, private organizations, and civil society to create synergistic partnerships across sectors while aligning diverse actors who may have conflicting priorities.
The course introduces Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) as a core framework, which involves diagnosing root causes of policy issues, adapting solutions through iterative experimentation, and scaling successful interventions only after thorough testing. Coalition building emerges as another essential strategy, requiring engagement with stakeholders at multiple levels including local governments, private sector entities, and NGOs to ensure policy design meets the needs of diverse groups while building sustainable partnerships for implementation. The course also emphasizes data-driven policy design that leverages demographic and geographic data to target resources where disparities are most pronounced and uses evidence to inform decision-making processes.
Adaptive leadership emerges as a crucial success factor, characterized by testing small-scale pilot programs, measuring impact and refining strategies, and scaling up successful models gradually. The course emphasizes the importance of localized implementation that customizes solutions to local contexts, deploys community-based approaches, and builds local capacity for sustainability. Throughout all these elements, continuous learning is positioned as fundamental to success, embracing iterative approaches, learning from failures and adapting accordingly, and sharing lessons across different contexts.
The overarching message from the Harvard course is that successful public policy implementation requires a sophisticated combination of systematic analysis, collaborative approaches, adaptive strategies, and continuous learning to effectively address complex societal challenges. The course demonstrates that policy success depends not just on good intentions or sound theoretical frameworks, but on the ability to navigate real-world complexities, build genuine partnerships, and remain flexible enough to adapt as circumstances evolve.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 36 Participants successfully completed this 5-month hybrid program in September 2025. These are their learning journey stories.