Anitha Sivasankaran

Anitha Sivasankaran has extensive experience designing, leading, and executing measurement, evaluation, and learning (MEL) efforts across a range of sectors related to international development, including health, nutrition, financial and digital inclusion, and economic opportunities. A trained economist, she brings deep expertise in designing fit-for-purpose, rigorous MEL systems and evaluation approaches, developing well-aligned measures, applying cutting-edge econometric and other analytical techniques, and translating evidence into actionable insights for decision-makers.

Sivasankaran is currently the project director for Mathematica’s MEL partnership with the Gates Foundation’s Digital Connectivity Learning Agenda team and the principal investigator for Mathematica’s work with the Gates Foundation’s Women’s Economic Empowerment team. She has previously led MEL efforts under various initiatives for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health team, The Power of Nutrition, and the Gates Foundation’s Digitize, Direct, and Design Initiative.

In these roles, she has led the development of measurement and learning frameworks; designed and refined indicators to track progress at strategy and portfolio levels; provided technical assistance to grantees and program teams to integrate measurement into their work; led evaluations and evidence reviews to capture learning and inform decision-making; overseen the creation of dashboards to visualize data and evidence; and facilitated learning and reflection sessions to inform strategy.

Sivasankaran has also designed and conducted mixed‐methods impact and performance evaluations of a range of reproductive, maternal, and child health and nutrition initiatives across Africa and South Asia for various foundations to inform strategy, strengthen implementation, or guide scale-up. These include evaluations of the following programs:

• The Surround Sound Kenya campaign, a multi-component media campaign funded by the Gates Foundation that seeks to shift norms across a range of key outcome areas affecting young people’s health and well-being
• The Challenge Initiative, a multi-country platform funded by the Gates Foundation to build local government capacity to support urban family planning programs
• Two David and Lucile Packard Foundation-funded community-based monitoring approaches that empowered elected female representatives and community members, respectively, to improve the quality of maternal health and reproductive health services in Bihar, India
• A large-scale multi-component reproductive health initiative funded by the Packard Foundation in Western Kenya
• The multi-donor Sukh urban reproductive health initiative in Pakistan
• Two Gates Foundation-funded health interventions that sought to improve the performance of frontline health workers in Bihar, India using a mobile application and team‐based incentives

Beyond her MEL work with foundations, Sivasankaran has also worked on a Millennium Challenge Corporation-funded evaluation of activities to assess the impacts of rehabilitation, training, and irrigation improvements in olive- and date-growing areas and the impacts of post-harvest infrastructure improvements in the agricultural sector in Morocco. She also helped conduct rigorous evaluations of pilot interventions to prevent school dropout in Cambodia, India, Tajikistan, and Timor-Leste, and was a certified reviewer for the What Works Clearinghouse Standards 3.0.

Sivasankaran holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.