Sonalini Khetrapal

Sonalini Khetrapal is a passionate health expert with over 15 years of experience leading transformational public sector projects in South Asia, South-East Asia, and North Africa. With a specialization in public health and economics, she has dedicated her career to researching, implementing, and advocating evidence-based strategies to address pressing public health challenges. She has led the ADB portfolio in designing and implementing public health interventions across all levels of governance.

Before joining ADB, she worked with the World Bank on health nutrition and population issues where she co-led the Integration of Health Systems project activities in Bangladesh and Philippines as part of an effort to engage stakeholders to build new knowledge on the interactions between global health initiatives and national health systems. She also worked on the Basic Health Service project in Ethiopia where she focused on developing sector-wide approaches and a study on willingness to pay for health care. She did analytical work on a range of health issues including Health Systems, Nutrition, Economics of Tobacco and Maternal and Child Health. She has also worked in the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, New York, where she was the project coordinator guiding tobacco use related policy reforms.

At ADB, Sonalini is the Team Lead for the health portfolio in India and Bhutan. She has led the design and implementation of lending support of over $3 billion dollars.  This includes transformational projects on primary health care delivery, medical education including human resources for health management, health sector assessments, pandemic preparedness, adult vaccination, regulatory strengthening, climate related health challenges and ‘One Health’ projects.

Sonalini holds a PhD degree from the Department of Health Economics and Policy from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, on the use and provision of health services under Public-Private Partnership contracts in the implementation of a social health Insurance scheme. She has a post graduate degree in Public Health from Columbia University, USA, where she focused on Health Policy and Management. Sonalini has majored in engineering from Cornell University, USA, with Economics and concentration on South Asia.