Asia-Pacific Power List 2021: Sapna Chadha, Google

Sapna Chadha

Senior country marketing director, India and Southeast Asia
Google
Singapore
Member since 2020

Sapna Chadha first joined the Power List last year, when several folks in the industry jumped to sing her praises. The industry veteran has been a key marketer at Google for nearly seven years, responsible for leading marketing at two of the tech giant’s crucial growth regions. Prior to Google, she held various senior positions at American Express over a decade, and was a consultant at Deloitte.

A major six-year project that Chadha designed, Internet Saathi, culminated this year on International Women’s Day. The programme was created to equip women in rural India with digital literacy training, and over six years it reached 30 million women through training provided by 80,000 “Internet Saathis”. Since the programme began, the proportion of internet users in rural India that are women increased from 10% to 40%, Google said. 

As ‘Internet Saathi’ was drawing to a close, the pandemic was worsening in India. After seeing how Covid was disproportionately affecting women, who were more likely to lose their jobs and be unable to return to education, Chadha and her team spearheaded an extension of the programme under which Google committed to help 1 million women in rural villages in India to become entrepreneurs through business tutorials, tools and mentorship. The commitment was announced by CEO Sundar Pichai at a ‘Google in India’ virtual event, in addition to US$25 million in grants to non-profits and social enterprises in India and around the world. As part of this commitment, Chadha is leading work to make Google products more inclusive and helpful for women entrepreneurs with the launch of women-led businesses on Search and Maps, and Business Pages on Google Pay for home-based entrepreneurs.  

Elsewhere, Chadha has led Google’s response to a surge in Covid in India, including working with product teams to find new ways to source and surface crowdsourced content and amplify donation drives. Chadha worked closely with Google.org to drive millions in donations to those in need. Her marketing team launched several campaigns to encourage vaccinations, including a Google Search campaign that surfaced vaccine-related FAQs, and a YouTube campaign that sought to tackle misinformation and vaccine hesitancy by encouraging users to trust experts. These campaigns are expected to reach over 600 million people in India between May to July this year.

Chadha is a champion of diversity and inclusion both in her work and in her industry contributions. She is an advisory board member to the World Women Foundation, and a member of the APAC DEI Council for Google in APAC. She regularly speaks at industry events—including our upcoming Diversity Talks event on June 30, co-hosted by Essence.

Chadha can be found on Twitter at: @SappyChadha