Madhavi Rajadhyaksha

Madhavi Rajadhyaksha is a senior director and head of Governance Practice at Abt Global Britain. She brings over 17 years of experience across development organisations, civil society, and the media, focusing on strengthening public institutions to improve people’s lives.

Rajadhyaksha has led and managed multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary global teams and held leadership positions on large and complex governance programmes with the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Food Programme. Her expertise spans from the policy design and planning stages to policy implementation, monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning. She has engaged with the political economy of reform to strengthen sectoral governance across public health and nutrition, gender, social protection, climate and resilience, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH).

In her role at Abt Global Britain, Rajadhyaksha leads the Governance Practice’s growth strategy, thought leadership, and engagement with key clients and partners. This involves coalition building across government and civil society for reform management, capacity strengthening, and knowledge management. She is deeply invested in furthering decentralisation and locally led development. She co-chairs the Asia Expert Working Group of the Local Public Sector Alliance, a global alliance of advocates for inclusive governance and sustainable development.

Before joining Abt, Rajadhyaksha led the Public Sector Governance portfolio at Oxford Policy Management, where she designed and delivered governance and civil society strengthening programmes. She developed a decentralisation toolkit to aid FCDO advisors to think and work politically. She managed UNICEF’s programme establishing a Financial Tracking System for Nutrition with seven ministries within the Government of Bangladesh. She also led the technical design and delivery of capacity-strengthening approaches for the World Food Programme across its priority countries. Her public policy experience is complemented with her work as a development journalist with The Times of India, where she wrote on a host of development issues and led media campaigns for impact.

Expertise

• Governance for inclusive service delivery
• Decentralisation
• Civil society strengthening  
• Technical assistance and implementation
• Capacity strengthening

Key Projects

• Wajibika – Tanzania, FCDO
• Enhancing Diagnostics Programme, FCDO
• Bihar Technical Support Programme-India, Gates Foundation
• Financial Tracking System for Nutrition-Bangladesh, UNICEF
• ELEVATE Nutrition, USAID

Publications

• Das P, Newton-Lewis T, Khalil K, Rajadhyaksha M, Nagpal P. How performance targets can ingrain a culture of 'performing out': An ethnography of two Indian primary healthcare facilities. Soc Sci Med. 2021 Oct 14:114489. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114489. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34702616
• King. M, Rajadhyaksha M, et al. The Decision Mapping Tool: Understanding ‘local’ decision-making in aid interventions, King’s College London. (2023).
• Gogoi, E., Pervaiz, A., Das Roy, R., Rajadhyaksha, M., & Mishra, S. (2020). C40 Cities Climate Action Planning, Governance Self-Assessment Guidance Document. C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group.
• Srivastava, S., & Rajadhyaksha, M. (2017). Can organisation development principles in India’s local governments improve governance? Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance, 135-156. https://doi.org/10.5130/cjlg.v0i19.5450
• Viswanathan, S., Rajadhyaksha, M., Gumber, A., Shahapur, S., & Kunte, G. (2014). Annual Survey of India's City-Systems. Bengaluru: Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy. 

Certifications

• Systems Change – Delta, School of Systems Change, December 2023
• Engaging Citizens: A Game-Changer for Development (March 2016); World Bank Group's MOOC
• Dasra Social Impact Accelerator Programme (2014– 2015)