As a Senior Fellow at EPoD India (2017-2021), I had partnered with several policymakers and donors both in India and Nepal which resulted in fruitful policy research collaborations.
As a Senior Fellow at EPoD India (2017-2021), I had partnered with several policymakers and donors both in India and Nepal which resulted in fruitful policy research collaborations.
Over two years, I was engaged with different Secretaries and Directors of the department. I facilitated a multi-year MOU between the department and my organization. Our relationship resulted in an observational study of a state-led data collection exercise for the anthropometric measures of children, known as "Vajan Tyohar", and a survey of Anganwadi frontline Workers and Lady Supervisors on the adaptations to nutrition services during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I facilitated multiple training and capacity building sessions of IAS officials and other civil servants on the effective use of data and evidence in policymaking and implementation.
I led the partner relations with IFPRI's India team, one of our donors. We jointly carried out projects to understand ways in which data and evidence can help improve nutrition service delivery in India, particularly in the state of Chhattisgarh.
This relationship had started in 2017 through a Data Deep Dive workshop led by me. That workshop opened further lines of communication between FCDO-N and my organization, which also resulted in multi-year research program. As a co-PI on this research program, I worked closely with the FCDO-Nepal team alongside researchers from Yale and the London School of Economics.
I nurtured this relationship since my first visit to Nepal in 2017. Over several years, I facilitated training and capacity building of the Nepali bureaucrats via NASC. In 2020, we also undertook two country-wide phone-based panel surveys of local government officials to understand how they responded to the COVID-19 crisis.
This relationship resulted in a research collaboration using a sensitive data on Nepali population. The aim of this research was to understand the selection of politicians in the 2017 local elections and how those elected politicians influenced access to earthquake reconstruction grants for damaged houses in Nepal.