Rajakumari Jandhyala is the co-founder and CEO of YAATRA Ventures, a U.S. private investment firm focused on economic infrastructure in power, energy, technology, natural resources, and transportation. She is an economist with a career spanning over 25 years in the private sector, public policy, investment, and diplomacy.
As CEO, she led the creation of the Albertine Graben Energy Consortium, securing a $4.5 billion private sector investment for East Africa’s energy sector, benefiting nearly 300 million people.
Ms. Jandhyala has played a pivotal role in international peace and security efforts. As a diplomat at the U.S. State Department, she led negotiations on key economic, peace, and security agreements for South Sudan’s independence, the implementation of the Naivasha peace accords between Khartoum and Juba, the Chad-Sudan border agreement, and Darfur security arrangements. As Deputy Assistant Administrator for Africa at USAID, she was a principal architect of the $7 billion Power Africa Initiative, which secured $20 billion in private investment to expand energy generation and access.
Ms. Jandhyala spent over a decade leading national policy and implementation institutions and served as a senior advisor to governments in Nigeria, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, the DRC, and Liberia on national security, ceasefires, disarmament, security sector reform, and post-war reconstruction. She was Special Advisor to the African Union on the Darfur peace talks, helping establish the Inter-Sudanese negotiations, the ceasefire commission, and the deployment of AU peacekeepers into Darfur. She also served as Special Advisor to the UN on security sector reforms in the DRC, overseeing force integration, foreign army withdrawals, and national security restructuring.
Ms. Jandhyala began her career as an economist at the World Bank. She holds a B.S. in Economics from Purdue University and a Master’s in International Policy in Economics and Security from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, with a focus on security and economics. Ms. Jandhyala serves on the Milken Institute Africa Advisory Council.
Ms. Jandhyala has dedicated her career to building solutions for complex economic and security challenges and providing trusted leadership for stakeholders with competing interests, helping to achieve broader transitions from war to peace and economic stability with far-reaching effects.
