Population Council Research that makes a difference

Ashish Bajracharya, Ph.D.

Associate

Ashish Bajracharya is an associate affiliated with the 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, capacity building, and programs related to health systems strengthening and health financing interventions designed to improve access, utilization, quality, and equity of maternal and reproductive health care services for poor women in South and Southeast Asia. He currently manages large-scale quasi-experimental evaluations of community-based health insurance programs and demand-side reproductive health voucher programs for safe motherhood and reproductive health in Bangladesh and Cambodia.

Bajracharya also works across the Council's two other programs in the region: HIV and AIDS and Poverty, Gender, and Youth. In Myanmar, he currently co-leads the Council's evaluation of and operations research on an intervention program designed to increase access to integrated HIV and sexual and reproductive health services for young, key, vulnerable populations. In Nepal, he co-leads a comprehensive study of adolescents commissioned by UNICEF-Nepal's Adolescent Development and Participation program on the adolescent experience in remote and underserved regions of Nepal. He also supports rigorous evaluations of gender-focused interventions in Bangladesh such as the Growing Up Safe and Healthy (SAFE) program, which has been designed to promote sexual and reproductive health and rights among vulnerable women in urban slums of Dhaka and is being evaluated using a randomized control trial design.

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 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, women's membership in microcredit groups and domestic violence in Bangladesh, marriage-based transactions and dowry in Nepal and other developing countries, and patterns in the timing of marriage and childbearing in developing countries in South Asia and Africa.

Bajracharya received his Ph.D. in policy analysis and management from Cornell University in 2008, where he specialized in social demography and human development. He is a native of Nepal.