SUMAN RIMAL GAUTAM

Dr. Suman Rimal Gautam has more than 25 years of experience as a practitioner and researcher in water, agriculture, natural resources management, human development, and associated policies in South, Southeast, and Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her key expertise lies in water resources management, water supply and sanitation (WASH), and irrigation with a focus on both the hard (infrastructure) related components as well as on soft (institutional strengthening), and supporting gender mainstreaming in water, agriculture and related resources management programs. She has substantial capability conducting policy dialogue with different stakeholders in water resources in her work on different donor funded projects (USAID, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Dutch Government, Ford Foundation and Gates Foundation). She started her career working in water for agriculture and has held progressively responsible experience providing technical assistance, business development and project management in programs in water supply sanitation and hygiene (WASH), water resources management (WRM), irrigation, water governance, and water security. She currently works as Project Manager, Water/NRM at ECODIT. Prior to this, for the USAID Water Communications and Knowledge Management (CKM) Project, she led knowledge creation and management activities, performing in-depth research and analysis in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), water resources management, gender, and agricultural water management, including for the Center for Water Security, Sanitation, and Hygiene at USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security. She also served as Deputy Chief of Party (DCOP) and supported the COP with day-to day project management. From October 2019 to January 2020, she served as Interim COP and managed the project team and all project activities and deliverables. She is able to assemble, mobilize, support and supervise teams to produce high quality and usable analyses to inform development programming. At different phases of her career, Dr. Gautam has supported knowledge management, learning, and thought leadership in water and human development, through different guidance notes, course module development and through various publications. In 2019, she served as a Strategist for the Obama Foundation and the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago Master of Arts in International Development and Policy (MA-IDP) program.