Mahua Mandal

Mahua Mandal has nearly two decades of experience conducting mixed-methods research, evaluation, and learning in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the United States. She specializes in designing and conducting theory-based evaluations; gender-sensitive evaluations; implementation research; and monitoring, learning, and evaluation (MLE) for complex initiatives.

Her content expertise includes family planning and reproductive health, adolescent health and positive youth development, HIV/AIDS, violence prevention, and cross-sectoral programs.

Mandal currently serves as project director for Mathematica’s Gates Foundation-funded monitoring, learning, and evaluation engagement to provide support for the commercial introduction and scale-up of depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA-SC), a self-injectable contraceptive method. As part of this engagement, Mandal leads a team at Mathematica and several local research partners to generate insights and produce learnings to optimize DMPA-SC commercialization approaches in four countries: Kenya, Uganda, Pakistan, and India. Mandal also serves as principal investigator for the Gates Foundation’s evaluation of edutainment programming in Kenya, to understand the impact of a combined media program on gender norms, family planning, and education behaviors of adolescents and youth. In addition, Mandal is the principal investigator on the Gates Foundation–funded Research Support for Scaling Women’s Voices and Local Ownership (WVLO) Impact project. Through this project, Mandal supports a suite of investments to generate rigorous evidence on how to optimize and scale WVLO impact to support demand for, and responsiveness of, family planning services in Pakistan, Senegal, and Ethiopia.

Previously, Mandal led a mixed-methods evaluation in Rwanda examining the long-term effects of a youth livelihoods project, including whether and how health-related decisions, behaviors, and gender dynamics in the family and workplace influenced livelihoods and related outcomes. This study was funded by USAID under Youth Power 2 Learning and Evaluation. In addition, Mandal supported a portfolio-level evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s (BMGF’s) family planning investments in Indonesia. She provided technical assistance and thought leadership to develop and refine MLE frameworks to support implementing the BMGF family planning strategy.

Mandal is adept at developing relevant theories of change, combining complexity-aware and participatory qualitative approaches with traditional evaluation study designs, and distilling mixed-methods findings and their implications to inform program and strategy direction.

Mandal has published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Adolescent Health, AIDS and Behavior, BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, and Global Public Health. Before joining Mathematica, Mandal held positions at John Snow, Inc.; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs; and USAID. She holds a Ph.D. in reproductive, perinatal, and women’s health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an M.P.H. from Columbia University.