Swetha Ramachandran is a doctoral researcher at The Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID). Her dissertation analyses how western aid agencies create perverse incentives for local actors in Sierra Leone. She uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. She is currently a Consultant for the ILO, where she trains mid-career policymakers on evidence-based policymaking and research methods. She is an affiliate with the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP) and is an active member of the Global Shapers network of the World Economic Forum (WEF). She previously served as a Teaching Assistant for the Masters’s programmes at IHEID and a Research Assistant for an SNSF-funded project on digital peacebuilding. Before commencing her PhD in 2020, Swetha worked as a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) professional for over two years and was based in eastern Sierra Leone, Lesotho, DRC and South Sudan. In her spare time, she enjoys badminton, running and blogging.

Fields of interest

• Aid financing

• Decolonising aid

• Localisation agenda

• Donor-recipient relations

• Project management in aid