Fellows

Salzburg Global Fellow Nidhi Khurana on her work as a thought partner in global health and her expectations of the 2023 Japan-India Tranformative Technology Network

This interview was conducted in April 2023, prior to Salzburg Global's Japan-India Transformative Technology Network in-person program in June 2023.

Nidhi Khurana is a global health professional with experience in policy development and analysis and has been a Salzburg Global Fellow since 2017. Having focused on health systems and health systems delivery in the past, Nidhi, as a Fellow of the Japan-India Transformative Technology Network 2023, would like to expand her knowledge network to approach development problems in a multidimensional way.

“Increasingly, when we talk about solving healthcare, we are not just solving health, we are often solving sanitation, gender equity, mobility, and women's empowerment all at the same time. This is because these are not problems that can be addressed in single interventional approaches. The approaches must be multi-dimensional, training different lenses, which is made possible by this program,” explained Nidhi.

Nidhi shared her extensive experience in global health and development. She is currently working as part of the UNICEF net technical advisory team in the South Asia office. Her role involves documenting lessons learned from various sectors, including health systems, humanitarian response, education, and risk communication. Nidhi mentions global mechanisms for coordination, such as the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator for vaccines, as well as the role of networks and collaboration in crisis response and system strengthening. She highlights the intersection of technology and innovation in addressing complex development problems and emphasizes the importance of collaboration and bringing together diverse expertise to drive social change.

Before transitioning to global health, Nidhi worked as a strategy consultant, helping companies make informed decisions on market entry, business growth, and diversification. Currently, she focuses on the intersection of strategy and global health, working as a thought partner with various development actors, including multilateral organizations, philanthropic foundations, and the research and academic space.

Nidhi's work also highlights the potential of technology, particularly during the pandemic, and its ability to address challenges and empower vulnerable populations. Keen to meet other professionals working on similar issue areas, Nidhi has already met a few Fellows of the Japan-India Transformative Technology Network program in Bangalore. Her expectations from the 2023 program are high, also in part due to her great experience from the 2017 Health program. She believes that the in-person program in Salzburg, with the setting of the Schloss Leopoldskron, can improve the collaboration potential between Indian and Japanese professionals by leaps and bounds.

“I'm particularly interested in the ability to enable people who have very powerful ideas, powerful solutions for difficult problems, and to be able to help them advocate for those solutions and to convey those in a way that speaks to policymakers, program designers and program managers,” reflected Nidhi.

Regarding her expectations of the program, Nidhi expresses her support for innovators and their solutions for various societal issues. Nidhi believes that the lives of innovators can be made easier, and the network can support innovators in overcoming regulatory and access barriers. She has been reaching out to create support networks and expects to continue doing so. Nidhi believes that the network from this program would maximize her potential as a development professional and open new avenues of innovation and implementation.

Nidhi's role involves shaping investments in public health programs by identifying needs, addressing gaps, and considering the urgency at a population level. She believes that people-to-people connections and multidisciplinary approaches are crucial in translating global coordination efforts to effective action at the local level. Therefore, Nidhi is extremely excited about the in-person program in Salzburg. She considers it an opportunity to develop a “toolkit for the future” to ensure better preparedness for improved systems and effective crisis response.

“I think the power of networks ... and collaboration is key. The idea of bringing together minds who are trained differently who have different experiences and bringing them together to collaborate on solutioning for difficult problems, wicked problems in development, to drive social change is essential and Salzburg Global has been doing it in a global context,” said Nidhi.