Sadia Afroze Chowdhury is an accomplished strategy and implementation leader in health and population policies and health systems development on global and regional scale, with over 30 years of experience. She proficient in positioning health in programmatic and operations support, policy formulation and technical support to tackle interconnected developmental issues on the ground across South and East Asia and Africa.
She has over 12 years of global experience with World Bank programs and operations; skills in working with government partners at various echelons of bureaucracy (policy, implementation, technical) and development partners, in low and middle income countries around the globe. At present she is the Senior Advisor on Reproductive Health and Population, Human Development Network of the World Bank.
In Bangladesh, she has over 8 years of experience in leading the implementation and taking to scale BRAC’s health program in Bangladesh, including developing partnerships with the public sector programs, development partners and other NGOs. From 1991 she has played the role of Director, Health, Population and Nutrition Division of BRAC and led over 1000 staff in the implementation of the Integrated Reproductive Health, Disease Control and Nutrition Program covering over 12 million populations in Bangladesh.
Having extensive skills and clear grasp of issues of global aid–architecture, governance, networking and partnership building, she has proven track record on partnership development with multilateral and bilateral agencies, resource mobilization and fund raising for programs through extensive dialogue and program advocacy with donors, and represented the institution in international fora.
She is a paediatrician who had received Merit Scholarship from Ministry of Education to undertake the MBBS degree at Dhaka Medical College from 1968-1974. She has completed Masters in Public Health (Health Policy and Management) from Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston from 1990-91. She possesses diverse knowledge and advanced technical skills in reproductive health and population policies, including gender, maternal and child health and health systems, and extensive programmatic skills in Public, Social protection, Poverty Alleviation and Sanitation.
She has travelled extensively to remote areas in several countries in Africa, South and East Asia, including countries in crisis, for better understand of the problems and constraints faced by the local people, and the challenges of poverty. She has published numerous research papers within and beyond academic arena both nationally and internationally. She had been a Lecturer of Department of Physiology at Dhaka Medical College from 1976-1978. She appears as Guest Lecturer in many notable universities in home and abroad, including Harvard School of Public Health.
