Isha Varma has over 12 years of experience optimizing impact for International Health and Development institutions. She is an expert in creating inaugural monitoring, evaluation, and learning frameworks that guide strategic decision making at the C-suite level at large and small humanitarian non-profits, philanthropies, social enterprises, and community-based organizations. Her process is grounded in feminist and rights-based participatory methods, human-centered design, and systems thinking.
Her clients have recognized her for being excellent at optimizing engagement with multiple stakeholders through participatory processes that carefully align and braid the complex needs of each party into actionable strategies.Most recently, as the Girls First Fund’s inaugural Monitoring, Evaluation, andLearning Director she oversaw the development and launch of a MEL system to measure social norms change towards the prevention of child marriage, successfully weaving together the needs of a donor-collaborative board and the community-based organizations they fund.
She has developed organizational strategy, theories of change, indicator matrices, and evaluations on behalf of the Packard Foundation, Americares, International Youth Alliance for Family Planning, Non-Communicable Disease Alliance, Plan International – Ethiopia, and the CleanAir Fund. Her ability to bring tangible results to the C-suite is due to her work in various capacities in a variety of organizations including operations (Relief International) and communications (International Medical Corps).
Isha has fluency in English and Hindi, and a basic working knowledge of Spanish and has spent time working in East and West Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Dominican Republic. She has a Master’s in Public Health in Measurement and Evaluation of Global Health Systems and Development from Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and a B.A. inPsychology from UCLA. She currently lives in New York City with her partner and her indomitable 16-year-old dog.