Dr. Bharat Kulkarni is Founding Director of Stalwart Management Consultancy Services, a consulting firm, working in the field of policy advisory and development of Agri value chain in Africa. He has worked for about one and half decade on various Agri business development projects and Structured Markets initiative in Africa. Bharat started his career as a lecturer in Finance and then worked with The United Nations till 2011. During this period he was part of the team that set up the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, Ethiopia, first commodity exchange in east Africa. After resigning from United Nations in 2011, he established his consulting firm and since, has been advising several commodity exchange projects of governments. And private sector His clients include governments in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Malawi through agencies like The World Bank, USAID, IFC, Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa, and many others from Private Sector. He is a highly sought after speaker on Agricultural value chain and Agri business policies in frontier economies and travels across the globe to speak at various conferences year round. He is a regular speaker at prestigious forums like the Harvard Business School, World Investment Forum of the United Nations, Global Commodities forum etc. He is a PhD in Economics and has written three books, one on Agri risk Management and other on Commodity Markets and Derivatives. His third book “ ECX and the Winds of Change; A memoir from Ethiopia was published in 2023