Aparna Krishnan

Aparna Krishnan is a senior advisor on Evidence to Policy (E2P) government partnerships and capacity building efforts, including the use of administrative data for research and policy. She leads the internal organizational learning agenda on pathways to evidence use and scale in working with governments. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME), India.  

Over the past two decades, Aparna has set up and led as the Project Director, several strategic partnerships to institutionalize the use of data and evidence within governments. These include J-PAL South Asia's flagship State partnership with the Government of Tamil Nadu; a large-scale project leveraging administrative data under the Innovations in Data, Experiments and Action (IDEA) initiative; and the interdisciplinary India Climate and Health Data Capacity Accelerator. Aparna has also served as the Executive Director of J-PAL South Asia, and in this role, launched and managed several large-scale research projects and partnerships across sectors of environment, health, governance and others. She engaged extensively in policy outreach and capacity building activities with state and national governments in India, multilateral and civil society agencies.

Apart from J-PAL, Aparna has worked with international organizations and NGOs as a consultant on monitoring and evaluation systems & frameworks and the use of data for decision making. Earlier in her career, she held research positions at the Madras Institute of Development Studies and the Centre for Micro Finance at IFMR in India, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the UNDP-GEF in the United States. Aparna has a master's in international development & policy from the University of California, San Diego, USA and a master's in economics from the Gokhale Institute, Pune, India. 

Relevant links: 

How to Use Data for Everyday Decisions in a Pandemic, blog with Harini Kannan, J-PAL, October 2020 

Improving Last Mile Delivery of Public Services by leveraging Digital Data, blog with Harini Kannan, United Nations World Data Forum, October 2020

Investing in Evaluation Capacity Development in India, Why it Matters Now More than Ever? blog with Shagun Sabarwal, Independent Evaluation Group, World Bank, July 2020.  

Closing the Data Policy Feedback Loop, interview for Exemplars in Global Health, August 2021