Rishi Sunak, who takes over as the prime minister of the UK on October 25, and his wife, Akshata Murty, have a long history of funding, supporting and encouraging social initiatives.
From funding those looking to solve social issues to enabling technology adoption, the Directors at Catamaran Ventures in the UK, Sunak and Murty, have donated millions of dollars for several causes.
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In 2013, Sunak, the first Indian-origin prime minister of the UK, and Murty, the daughter of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, announced millions of dollars worth of aid for their alma mater Stanford GSB's Center for Social Innovation (CSI).
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"Entrepreneurship is important, but now social entrepreneurship is the best of both worlds—it has large-scale impact by funding new ideas, and social impact at that. To me that is very interesting, meaningful, and at the end of day has the biggest bang for the buck," Murty said at the event announcing the grant.
The investment was to fund the Social Innovation Fellowship (SIF). The fund provides financial and advisory support through an application process to graduating students and recent alumni who have "a clear, innovative, and well-developed vision for addressing a particular social or environmental challenge and a commitment to building a successful nonprofit organization to deliver their proposed innovation".
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"Social entrepreneurship is a relatively new and evolving field, so it's exciting to be at the beginning of something," Sunak said.
"I come from a family of entrepreneurs, my mother on the social side through the foundation world and my father on the corporate side. I was raised with a view that entrepreneurship can change people's lives," Murty added.
The couple also has Murty Sunak Quantitative and Computing Lab (QCL) at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) in California. It integrates a "broad spectrum of quantitative issues, including mathematics, computation, statistics, programming, data analysis, and visualization" with the liberal arts discipline. They also committed $3 million to the lab.
"The importance of data in today's world, and the growing need for its integration across the broader liberal arts curriculum at CMC, is the reason she [Murty] and her husband, Rishi Sunak, committed $3 million to the newly opened Murty Sunak Quantitative and Computing Lab (QCL)," the lab's website read.
The lab helps students to apply quantitative literacy and data to social sciences, sciences, and humanities.
Following the allegations of tax evasion, Sunak and Murthy, in April, donated over £100,000 to his old private school, Winchester College. The private boys' boarding school, which costs £43,335 a year to attend, revealed the donation in its annual journal, The Guardian reported.
Murty made news earlier this year when it emerged that she held non-domiciled status that allowed her not to pay tax on her earnings from outside the UK. She later agreed to pay UK tax on her global income.
According to a BBC report, Sunak was on his way to Buckingham Palace to meet King Charles who will ask him to form the government. The 42-year-old would then head to Downing Street to get to work and the first task would be to put his cabinet together.
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