Monalisa Padhee is the Program Head of Education and Wellness Initiative at Emp Bindi International association. In her role, she works on delivering education and health care interventions directed at disrupting the “intergenerational cycle of proverty” in rural girls and women with an intersectional lens of health , gender and climate change.
She and her team have adopted the AAA (Awareness, Access and Advocacy) model to build healthy and resilient communities. She works with communities to co-create interactive curriculum using local arts on various health topics such as menstrual and reproductive health and nutrition that transcends the barrier of literacy. Using a community-driven approach supported by digital tools, her efforts have been to enable grassroots leaders to disseminate health information and provide basic health services. She is also passionate about creating entrepreneurial health solutions.
Along with this she also works with a team of educators who strive to bring holistic education and build knowledge and leadership around SDGs and climate change to some of the most marginalized communities. She and her team has launched the “Young Climate Leadership Curriculum” which is a rurally contextualized curriculum for adolescents and youth to enable them to “THINK, SPEAK and ACT ” on issues of climate change in their communities. Ensuring that children from the last mile communities receive quality education, they have launched the digital community school initiative which provides an informal learning space to last-mile communities and builds their functional literacy and numeracy , along with driving conversations around gender, health and climate change
Monalisa actively writes opinion pieces and advocates for bringing people from grassroots at decision making platforms. She is a senior Atlantic Fellow for health equity at GW and alumni of Acumen fellowship, Aspen New Voices fellowship and Swedish Gender Lab fellowship She holds a Doctoral degree in Medical Science from University of South Australia and an Undergraduate degree in Biotechnology from ICFAI University.
