Radhika Menon

Radhhika
Designation: Lead, Research Uptake Hub, Oxford Policy Management
Radhika Menon is the lead for the Research Uptake Hub at Oxford Policy Management. Prior to this, she worked with 3ie as the senior policy uptake officer. She worked with 3ie grantees for developing policymaker and stakeholder engagement strategies to ensure research uptake, anchored the advocacy work, contributed to developing 3ie's communication strategy, blogs, features and policy briefs.

A former journalist, Radhika has considerable experience in covering finance and economic policies. She has worked with leading Indian and international media outlets including the Hindu - Business line and CNBC. She has also directed a documentary film on the theme of ‘Gender and Space’ for the NGO PUKAR (Partners in Urban Knowledge Action and Research). Radhika holds an MA in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

Blogs by author

The Global Open Knowledge Hub: building a dream machine-readable world

Radhika Menon 18 February 2014 blog  
The word ‘open’ has long been bandied about in development circles. We have benefited in recent years from advocacy to increase open access to research articles, and open data shared by researchers or organisations. But open systems that enable websites to talk to each other (e.g. open application programming interface) have been a little harder to advance into greater use, simply because they are not built for non-technical users.

Making participation count

Radhika Menon 09 January 2014 blog  
Toilets get converted into temples, and schools are used as cattle sheds. These are stories that are part of development lore. They illustrate the poor participation of ‘beneficiaries’ in well-intentioned development programmes. So, it is rather disturbing that millions of dollars are spent on development programmes with low participation, when we have evidence that participation matters for impact.

Of rumours related to blood, poison and researchers

Radhika Menon, Thomas de Hoop 28 January 2013 blog  
The attempt to collect blood samples of children for a malaria treatment intervention in Kenya met with stiff opposition from the study community. There were rumours of blood stealing, covert HIV testing and suspicion about the safety of the study drugs. It may be quite easy to attribute this rumour to ignorance and superstition. But these rumours do not come out of the blue. Historical, anthropological and sociological accounts can trace the roots of such distrust and suspicion.

Field notes on implementing impact evaluations

Radhika Menon 11 November 2012 blog  

3ie is currently funding 100 impact evaluations in low and middle-income countries spread across Africa, Asia and Latin America. We are now in a unique position to learn a lot about what’s working well in designing and conducting impact evaluations and what can be done better to ensure that research produces reliable and actionable findings.