Janhavi Nilekani

Founder

Janhavi Nilekani is the founder of Aastrika Foundation (2019)[1], an Indian non-profit working on healthcare and women & children from Bengaluru.

Janhavi Nilekani is an Indian development economist and the founder and chairperson of the Aastrika Foundation, which works to improve the quality of maternity care in India through training for frontline health workers and the promotion of professional midwifery.

She established Aastrika in 2019 with support from Nilekani Philanthropies, and in 2021 opened the Aastrika Midwifery Centre, a midwife-led birth centre in Bengaluru.

Early life and education

Nilekani took a BA in economics and international studies at Yale University, graduating cum laude in 2010, and a PhD in public policy at Harvard University, completed in 2018.

Career

Nilekani has said that her own experience of childbirth in India, which she found disempowering, prompted her to work on maternal health. In 2019 she founded the Aastrika Foundation, which concentrates on building the capacity of healthcare workers across India and on professional midwifery training, arguing that respectful, evidence-based care should be available to all women giving birth.

In 2021 she founded the Aastrika Midwifery Centre in Bengaluru, a birth centre offering midwife-led maternity care. Her stated aims include reducing unnecessary intervention in childbirth and establishing midwifery as a recognised profession within the Indian health system.[2][3][4][5]

Aastrika Foundation

Aastrika Foundation is a Bengaluru-based not-for-profit founded in 2019 by Dr Janhavi Nilekani that works to improve the quality of maternal care in India. It supports the Nurse Practitioner in Midwifery programme with the Karnataka Department of Health and Family Welfare and UNICEF, including the National Midwifery Training Institute at Vanivilas Hospital, Bengaluru, and State Midwifery Training Institutes in Mysuru and Belagavi. It also runs Aastrika Sphere, a free digital learning platform for nurses and midwives.

Aastrika Foundation reports the following, on its own site: