South Asia

Rituu B Nanda is one of our new Trustees for the South Asia region! Shining light on others and learning from the wisdom of communities guide Rituu’s life. She is working towards appreciation and deep listening.

Rituu has spent 15+ years working on community ownership, Monitoring and Evaluation, participatory action research, facilitation, knowledge management, equity, and behaviour change across the globe. She moderates an online community of practice where you will find more than 2100 blogs on community work  http://aidscompetence.ning.com

Currently, she provides support to Global Fund for children’s  India-based partners, on participatory MEL. At the Institute of Social Studies Trust, Rituu moderates gender and evaluation online community of practice. She is a facilitator for ‘Freedom Rising’ a movement-building initiative.

Rituu is pursuing her second master’s degree in Evaluation and holds a certification in Public Health. 

Sonia Garcha has more than three decades of experience in community development and entrepreneurship development with a focus on urban and rural women. Developing practices to strengthen the unorganised sector in India through various mentorship and entrepreneurship development programs across five states in India. Working with Vrutti in building capacities and developing best practices for woman fish vendors- 5,000 in Mumbai and 1,500 in Chennai.    

Sonia won the Social Innovation award in 2018 at the National Conference for Social Innovation for her work in “Digital empowerment of women: DigiShakti” which gained relevance during Covid-19. Worked on developing “Smart practices for Smart Vendors” across many states. Her work in women’s empowerment with Forbes Marshall received recognition through the first Asia CSR award and the first Sandvik Asia CSR award.  

Sonia is a member of the CSpathshala committee, an ACM India education initiative and has made significant contributions to the development and implementation of strategy. The CSpathshala curriculum has been successfully implemented in over 600 rural schools in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. As a member of the steering committee, she was involved in the four editions of CTiS (Computational Thinking in Schools), a conference for teachers. She was also part of the organising team for the Tactile Accessible Computational Thinking (TACT) Grand Challenge. Has been associated with organising the Bebras India Computational Thinking Challenge since 2018.

Sonia lives in Pune, India. She is married and has two lovely daughters. In her free time, Sonia bakes cakes, runs and practices yoga.