Alumni Feature | Sharada Srinivasan, Master’s in Public Policy ‘16

Sharada Srinivasan works as a Young Professional in the Digital Development Global Practice of the World Bank Group. Spending much of her childhood in Gujarat, her family moved to Bangalore after the 2002 riots. Prior to pursuing her Master of Public Policy at NLSIU, she completed an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Ramaiah Institute of Technology. She transitioned to public policy immediately after college. Her engagement in international parliamentary debating, which expanded her world view on regressive social norms, tipped the scales in favour of a career on social impact. At NLS, she received access to an arsenal of tools to approach problems in development, and a diverse cohort with experiences that fostered active peer-learning. While at NLS, she pursued internships at government entities, international think tanks, domestic advocacy organisations as well as summer schools in Internet governance. Through an international fellowship at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Joao Pessoa in Brazil, she met with her first boss – Christopher Yoo, Imasogie Professor of Law and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition. Sharada takes most pride in taking insights from academic research to policymakers and working within the policy process to enact change. At 1 World Connected, a global research project, her research focused on the empirical validation of innovative initiatives that address supply-and demand-side challenges to improve broadband adoption globally. This project fed directly into several conversations with policy-making and grant-funding organisations. Sharada was an active participant in the intersessional work of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, where she co-led the production of the Connecting and Enabling the Next Billions – Phase III and Phase IV final output reports and contributed to the work of the Best Practice Forum on Gender and Access. She has been part of the EQUALS Research Coalition on Access and served on the IEEE Humanitarian Activities Committee’s Assessment sub-committee. In her present role at the World Bank, she supports operations in Afghanistan and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and contributes to global knowledge products and country technical assistance on issues pertaining to data governance and gender digital divides, and broadband connectivity.