Nutan Zarapkar is Director of the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) division of RTI International India, a wholly owned subsidiary of RTI International, USA.
Ms. Zarapkar is a Chemical Engineer with over 25 years of work experience in climate change, environment, and energy. Given that improved WASH access directly leads to climate change adaptation co-benefits, Ms. Zarapkar holds deep expertise in conceptualizing innovative climate resilience WASH projects, leveraging private finance, and adopting blended finance structures and climate finance streams for supporting WASH projects. She led the Sanitation Technology Platform (STEP) program, which aimed to mainstream sustainable sanitation technology. This included setting up a technology testing facility, providing advisory services to technology providers, and facilitating relationships with commercial partners. Ms. Zarapkar also conceptualized the WASH Hub, a platform designed to enhance private sector engagement in India’s Odisha and Rajasthan states. RTI has developed more than $20 million in WASH projects for the private sector, which has the potential of benefitting 500,000 households. As a supporter of the water circularity agenda, she has led blended finance projects in partnership with the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to help Rajasthan industries overcome water risks.
Prior to joining RTI, Ms. Zarapkar worked for IFC-World Bank. She was responsible for developing climate investment and advisory business for IFC-FIG South Asia. Her work focused on enhancing the IFC climate finance instruments to financial institutions (FI), building environmental, social and governance (ESG) capacity amongst FIs to make them investment ready, creating markets, and develop new business opportunities for IFC in climate/sustainable/ESG finance. She supported the Commercial Bank of Ceylon for $150 million deal in sustainable finance, helping the bank create a healthy pipeline of environment projects for climate finance lending. Prior to this Ms. Zarapkar worked as Executive Director, Climate Change and Sustainability Practice at Ernst and Young, where she supported clients in securing carbon funds through compliance and voluntary carbon markets.
Ms. Zarapkar has also worked with the Clinton Climate Initiative as a City Director for the C40 Cities program, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a Program Specialist, and at the United States Asia Environmental Partnership. Ms. Zarapkar spent the early part of her career providing design and engineering support to sewage, industrial water, and wastewater plants.
Throughout her career, she has undertaken several capacity building programs at state and city levels, and she has collaborated extensively with industry leaders, government, and non-government organizations to support their projects and to build strong public-private partnerships.
