Radhika Menon

Radhhika
Designation: Lead, Research Uptake Hub, Oxford Policy Management
Radhika Menon is the lead for the Research Uptake Hub at Oxford Policy Management. Prior to this, she worked with 3ie as the senior policy uptake officer. She worked with 3ie grantees for developing policymaker and stakeholder engagement strategies to ensure research uptake, anchored the advocacy work, contributed to developing 3ie's communication strategy, blogs, features and policy briefs.

A former journalist, Radhika has considerable experience in covering finance and economic policies. She has worked with leading Indian and international media outlets including the Hindu - Business line and CNBC. She has also directed a documentary film on the theme of ‘Gender and Space’ for the NGO PUKAR (Partners in Urban Knowledge Action and Research). Radhika holds an MA in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

Blogs by author

Building evidence culture within government: the Ugandan case

When we work with our government partners to encourage evidence generation and use, we draw on our experiences from success cases we know well. Uganda is a particularly important case, where 3ie supported the evaluations of several flagship government programmes and contributed to capacity development.

The tricky business of measuring latrine use: lessons from 3ie’s evidence programme

There has been a fair bit of hoopla around India being declared open defecation free last month.  In the media debates, the measurement of India’s open defecation-free status has come under a good deal of scrutiny. Leaving aside the politics of the debate, there remains an important question: how can latrine use be measured rigorously?

A shot in the arm: why engaging with a range of stakeholders matters

When 3ie set up the Innovations in Increasing Immunisation Evidence Programme, we realised early on that we had to walk the talk. The evidence programme funded formative and impact evaluations of community-based approaches for boosting coverage in countries with low or stagnating immunisation rates. But community members and local decision makers had not been figuring prominently in our approach to how our grantees engage with stakeholders.

Moving the debate forward on community-driven development

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about (Oscar Wilde). Our recent review of community-driven development (CDD) is certainly being talked about. Sparked off by Duncan Green’s blog on our review, there has been an active debate about CDD on social media.

Making WASH behaviour stick

Small scale trials have repeatedly demonstrated the health benefits of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programmes. But the benefits disappear when many of these programmes are taken to scale. Large scale handwashing, sanitation and water treatment campaigns in India, Bangladesh, Peru and Vietnam have not led to a change in the behaviour of most of the people they target. So, the health impacts of these programmes are insignificant.