Nandita Bhatla

As WorldBeing’s Vice President and Country Director in India, Nandita Bhatla oversees all strategic planning, program implementation, training, assessment, operations and fund development in India.

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Previously Nandita served as Program Director, overseeing all WorldBeing programs in India, including training, implementation and monitoring. She also served as a key member of WorldBeing’s scalability team, working to ensure strategic and sustainable approaches to scale-up of WorldBeing’ Youth First and Girls First | KGBV programs.

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Prior to joining WorldBeing, Nandita served as Senior Technical Specialist and thematic lead for the portfolio on gender, gender-based violence and rights at the Asia Regional Office of the International Center for Research on Women | ICRW. She has nearly 20 years of experience in the field of gender and development, with particular expertise in gender mainstreaming and gender analysis, primary prevention of gender-based violence, and understanding the links between gender-based violence and other development issues such as education, women’s property rights, HIV/AIDS, and governance.

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Prior to ICRW, Nandita worked extensively with community organizations in India, designing and implementing need-based and gender-integrated programs. She is an active contributor to strategic advocacy networks and groups on issues of gender mainstreaming, gender-based violence and land rights for women in India. She has developed educational curricula on adolescent reproductive health, education, and gender and edited news-feature magazines; as well as served as a resource for training on participatory material creation related to gender and health. Nandita also was part of pioneering efforts to set up residential schools for adolescent girls for continuing education in an Uttar Pradesh district. In the same district, she also trained a team of rural, neo-literate women in journalism, to produce an award-winning local newspaper.

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Nandita has a master’s degree in science, with a specialization in child development from Lady Irwin College, Delhi University. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in social science from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.