Population Council Research that makes a difference

Ashish Bajracharya, Ph.D.

Associate

Ashish Bajracharya is an associate affiliated with Population Council’s Reproductive Health program and is based in its office in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Bajracharya's work at the Council focuses primarily on research and program activities related to the Council's Reproductive Health (RH) Vouchers project, which evaluates demand-side financing (voucher) interventions being implemented in five countries in Africa and Asia to improve access, utilization, quality, and equity of maternal and reproductive health care services for poor women. Bajracharya currently works on RH Vouchers evaluations in two countries, Bangladesh and Cambodia, providing technical assistance, research and programmatic support, and overall monitoring and management. He is also involved in research and evaluation activities related to the Growing Up Safe and Healthy (SAFE) program in Bangladesh, a multisectoral intervention aimed at promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights among vulnerable women by facilitating resources that promote gender equity, agency, and choice.

Prior to joining the Bangladesh office in 2012, Bajracharya was staff associate in the Council's office in Hanoi, Vietnam, from 2011 to 2012, where he worked on developing and implementing an innovative commune-based health management information system (HMIS) in the Thai Nguyen Province in northern Vietnam that aimed at promoting the utilization of data and evidence in health planning and decisionmaking in Vietnam.

Bajracharya started his career at the Population Council in 2008 as a Fred H. Bixby Postdoctoral Fellow in the Council's headquarters in New York City, where he was affiliated with the Poverty, Gender, and Youth program. As a Bixby fellow, Bajracharya's work was primarily focused on early marriage and transitions to adulthood of adolescent girls in Nepal. His work during the fellowship also included research on maternal employment and children's schooling in Nepal, microcredit group membership and domestic violence in Bangladesh, marriage-based transactions and dowry in Nepal and other developing countries, and the patterns in the timing of marriage and childbearing in developing countries in South Asia and Africa.