Manika Saha is a public health development practitioner and human-centric design-for-development researcher. Manika works at the nexus of international and humanitarian development, community development, gender and women’s empowerment, and inclusive governance in low- and middle-income countries. As the Centre’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Manager, Manika’s role is to champion the use of innovative methods to evaluate programs, monitor implementation progress and co-design context-relevant programs through the lens of the human-centred research approach.
Manika has completed a master’s degree in Global Health from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK, as a Commonwealth Scholar, and holds a Master’s in Food & Nutrition from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She acted as a public health nutritionist and researcher at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) and WorldFish (a CGIAR organisation) in Bangladesh. Manika has developed, published and applied several training manuals on nutrition-sensitive agriculture; these materials have now been adopted and mainstreamed in the Bangladesh Government’s Agriculture Extension Services. She is finalising her PhD at the Faculty of IT, Monash University, Australia where her focus is on human-centred design approaches to incorporate disadvantaged community voices in project commissioning for international development. Her research has been published across disciplines including in Public Library of Science, British Medical Journal, Food and Nutrition Bulletin, Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Information & Communication Technologies and Development.
