No matter when someone writes to Ashish Gadnis, there is almost no chance he will answer from Austin, Texas, where he lives. He spend in Rwanda and in Brazil, before taking a flight to Myanmar. He’s not a coffee grower, but he will talk about fair trade, and with a huge Benedictine cross on his chest, he will speak to you about Catholic Social Teaching providing a clear goal for his company – taking 100 million people out of poverty by 2026.
And Gadnis knows what poverty is. He grew up in Mumbai, India, in the 1970s when there wasn’t “much options those days in India to get out of poverty.”
“I did not want to stay in that ration line and I realized that I could break the cycle of poverty if I could get a job as a software programmer,” he recalled.
But for a 20-year-old Indian it wasn’t really about education – it was about getting out of the country: “That’s the dogma – if you want a better life, you gotta go.”
He immigrated first to Colombia and then, in 1994, landed in the United States. Ten years later, he was a founder and CEO of a successful IT company.
