Staff

Kundhavi Balachandran is Senior Programme Officer of East and Southeast Asia at EMpower. Her role involves portfolio engagement and expansion, technical support for partner capacity enhancement, and facilitating diverse stakeholder groups to align in the mission of EMpower in East and Southeast Asia. Onboarding partners working at systemic level and with lived experience leadership, designing and executing a series of participatory, capacity strengthening initiatives which reached the widest pool of partner representatives, pioneering a regional Community of Practice and piloting a youth consultation in Indonesia which provided input to the regional strategy are some of her key achievements.

Kundhavi brings 20 years of involvement in the not-for-profit and corporate sectors. She has worked in Asia, Africa and Europe in strategy, grants, programmes, training and stakeholder engagement. She has a master’s in social development practice from the University College of London, a bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Colombo and a post graduate diploma in marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

In her free time, she is a capacity building volunteer for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, a volunteer in her son’s Happy Bees unit, tinkers with a children’s book she co-authored and yet to be published, and pretends to cook-up a storm with a disclaimer that people who have eaten from her kitchen have gone on to live!