Sohail Agha is Senior Advisor, Digital Behavior Change at Global Health Visions. A behavioral scientist and public health expert, Sohail believes that simplifying behavior models and leveraging technology to lower data collection costs are crucial for scaling the use of behavioral insights in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Sohail has 14 years of deep expertise in operations research for a social marketing organization, Population Services International, and a maternal and child health service delivery organization, Jhpiego. A key component of his work involves the use of behavior models developed in Psychology. He has designed and evaluated social marketing, communications, social franchising, and voucher interventions in HIV/AIDS, family planning (FP), maternal, newborn, and child health (MNCH), and immunization.
In 2022, Sohail established the Behavioral Insights Lab, aiming to use technology to make survey data collection inexpensive for practitioners in LMICs. This lab focuses on simplifying digital data collection methods and developing approaches that can be easily used by practitioners.
Previously, Sohail worked as an Associate Professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health between 2003 and 2008. He also served as a Senior Program Officer for Demand and Behavior Change at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) from 2015 to 2022, where his role was to support family planning, immunization, and gender equality teams to incorporate normative and behavioral approaches into their work.
Sohail has worked extensively in Nigeria, Zambia, Mozambique, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Yale University and a PhD in Population Dynamics with a specialization in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Areas of Expertise:
- Operations research in social marketing
- Behavioral science in public health
- Designing and evaluating interventions in HIV/AIDS, FP, MNCH, and immunization
- Digital technology for data collection
- Academic and practical applications of behavior models