Aman Walia

Age:

Home Town: Ambala, Haryana

Education: M.A. in Development, Azim Premji University

Specific Field Interests: Gender Intersectionality, Women’s Collectives, Financial Inclusion, Action Based Research, Program Design for Development Interventions

Placement: IFMR LEAD in Chennai, Tamil Nadu

Area of Focus: Livelihoods

Fellowship Project: Pilot a project to institutionalize and scale up tested approaches to gender integration and transformation using women’s federations under the National Rural Livelihood Mission and State Livelihood Missions.

Highlights: Aman is serving as an American India Foundation (AIF) Clinton Fellow with IFMR Lead in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. For his fellowship project, he is piloting an initiative to institutionalize and scale up tested approaches to gender integration and transformation using women’s federations under the National Rural Livelihood Mission and State Livelihood Missions. Aman is a recent postgraduate with a Master’s in Development. He holds an undergraduate degree in Engineering and has six months of work experience in the corporate sector. “How will an ideal society that we dream of look like and what would it take to build that society?” has been an unsettling question for him for years and a driving force for him to make the transition from Engineering to Social Science. He has the experience of carrying out research studies in semi-urban and rural settings, which supported him in understanding the challenges faced by different marginalized social groups. It also encouraged him to brainstorm about the ground-level complexities of the social sector. He conducted a research study about “(de)coding human development through the use of technology in a digital village” in the first digital village of Haryana. It was an attempt to establish an inter-linkage between technological intervention and human development components and how social interactions take place in an information society. The outcome of the research study emphasized on the need to “localize the digitalization” and to move from “service delivery to sustainable deliverable.” Aman enjoys working in a multidisciplinary, cross-functional environment where he can execute a multi-pronged strategy to solve a problem. He is often excited by the use of empirical methods to address social problems. His special interest lies in preparing the socio-economic analysis of development interventions. In his free time, he likes exploring the realm of experimental and non-experimental research methods for program evaluation of development interventions. He considers the AIF Clinton Fellowship opportunity as a training ground to explore, experiment, and test whatever he has studied in books and theories about the development sector.