PROFILE DETAILS

1.3 Avijit Poddar

AVIJIT PODDAR, PhD

Research Consultant

  • PhD; MA in Economics and Development Studies
  • 25 years of research experience in around 60 studies conducted for all the major UN agencies and international NGOs—both home and abroad
  • Key expertise include socio-economic development, livelihood, public health, WASH, agricultural economics, value chain, socio-economic conditions in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), poverty

Avijit Poddar, economist by training has been working in HDRC since 2001. He obtained his PhD in 1982. Since 1995, he started his career as consultant having specialized in minority communities land and social rights. Currently his fields of interests are socio-economic development, livelihood, public health (including maternal, neonatal and child health), agricultural economics and mechanization. Dr. Poddar has notable experience in working on sexual and reproductive health, poverty, value chain analysis, socio-economic conditions in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), human rights, gender issues, rural electrification, child rights, and WASH issues (including WASH budget). He, in his credit, has a long list of baseline surveys, end-line surveys, impact assessments, evaluations, and mid-term reviews conducted for large scale development interventions throughout the country.

Dr, Avijit Poddar served as Project Coordinator, Research Project: “Identification of Best Practices of People’s Participation in Decision Making Process at the Community Level” – a collaborative fact-finding project awarded to PRIP program of PACT Int’l, USA under the Bangladesh Democracy Partnership Program sponsored by USAID, TAF and BRAC. He worked as proactive team member of an extensive research on “Assessment of the Qualitative Changes of Nijera Kori’s Social Mobilization, Voice and Democracy Program”, for Nijera Kori funded by DFID. The study extensively focused on measuring impact of social mobilization, voice of people, democracy, human rights and gender issues. This research work had been published as a book titled “Development as Conscientization: The Case of Nijera Kori in Bangladesh”; where he was a co-author.

In his long career in consultancy, Dr. Poddar worked in various capacities (team member, consultant, team leader) for over 60 assignments. He was involved in performing overseas consultancy assignments. Dr. Poddar conducted a study in Rwanda on barriers to access to maternal health services; conducted for Save the Children UK (SCUK), as Team Leader and Lead Researcher. He also acted as a core consultant in Viet Nam, assigned by UNFPA, in a study on quality of family planning services in Viet Nam.

Among many, a few of his research works available online, are shown below:

  1. Study on the Quality of Family Planning Services in Viet Nam (UNFPA Vietnam, 2017); Web link: https://goo.gl/Exp7V3
  2. Value for Money Study on Sanitation, Hygiene Education and Water Supply in Bangladesh (SHEWA-B) Programme Interventions (Unicef Bangladesh, 2015); Web link: https://goo.gl/8qSjdh
  3. Socio-economic Baseline Survey of Chittagong Hill Tracts conducted for UNDP-CHTDF (UNDP-CHTDF, 2009); Web link: https://goo.gl/Jn99mf