Vinay Nagaraju, recently graduated from Harvard Kennedy School’s Mid-Career MPA as an Edward S. Mason Fellow 2017. Vinay also holds an MBA from University of Oxford and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Bangalore University. He is a StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellow 2007. He was a Carr Center Fellow from 2018 to 2019.

Vinay is from India and has over twelve years of professional experience in leadership and strategic management roles. His international development work as COO of ‘Riders for Health’, hailed as the 7th most innovative NGO in the world, includes strategy, governance, operations, innovative finance, and advocacy. He worked at the heart of this path-breaking healthcare delivery social enterprise over a six-year period when it scaled from around £5M to £10M+, and reached from under 10M people to 25M people. He led a team that helped set-up a medical specimen transport system for Ebola testing in Freetown, Sierra Leone, liaising with multiple stakeholders. He has worked extensively to refine the innovative debt-financing model for their PPP projects with Ministries of Health in Africa. His experience in Africa includes working in The Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Lesotho.

Prior to this role, he worked for six years with Honeywell as a computer science engineer in the Aerospace domain, progressing into project management, strategy and leadership in key organisational initiatives. Earlier in his career, he co-founded and scaled ‘Spandana’ an education non-profit in Bangalore, India.