We have released a new episode in our podcast series A Decade of Building State Capability. In this episode, BSC Director Salimah Samji interviews Rebecca Trupin and Prateek Mittal, MPAID graduates who applied the PDIA concepts they learned in MLD103 to their work in Meghalaya, India.
In this episode, Rebecca and Prateek discuss how they came to work in maternal mortality in Meghalaya alongside their authorizer, Sampath Kumar, and how they adopted the PDIA approach to address complex challenges across multiple sectors.
Prateek and Rebecca are MPAID graduates (Class of 2020) of Harvard Kennedy School, where they took a PDIA course, with the Government of Meghalaya as their client. There, they had the opportunity to begin using PDIA on the problem of maternal mortality in Meghalaya, a rural state in Northeast India with poor health outcomes.
Both moved to Meghalaya following graduation to work full time as part of the newly established “State Capability Enhancement Project (SCEP)”. They have helped establish the SCEP unit as an in-house team that uses a locally-developed, PDIA-inspired approach to address complex development challenges across multiple sectors, ranging from health, to climate change, to early childhood development. This work has involved establishing new organizational practices and institutions within the government around frequent program reviews, cross-department collaboration, system-oriented problem diagnosis, and rapid action and experimentation.
Rebecca has previous experience in management consulting, program evaluation, and running a coffee business in East Africa. Prateek was previously a Senior Research Associate at Evidence for Policy Design, India, and a Transportation Planner at Champaign County Regional Planning Commission.
In addition to the MPAID, Rebecca holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Yale University. Prateek holds a Master of Urban Planning from the University of Illinois, and a Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India.
Rebecca and Prateek conducting their first PDIA session with District Collectors in December 2020
District Collectors expanding upon a draft fishbone analysis of maternal mortality during the PDIA session, December 2020.
Michael Woolcock during a PDIA + Adaptive Evaluation workshop in Shillong, Meghalaya in July 2022
Sampath on a health field visit
Sampath on a health field visit