Bhavya Gowda (she/her) is a strategic, authentic leader with 15 years of experience in market shaping across the health sector, primarily focused on sub-Saharan Africa. At Results for Development (R4D), she is a senior program director leading the Market Shaping Practice where she oversees a team dedicated to transforming access to and improving the sustainability of essential life-saving products. Ms. Gowda provides strategic thought leadership, technical direction, and effective management of the team.
Prior to joining R4D, Ms. Gowda spent nearly nine years working at PATH International in both Washington, D.C. and Johannesburg, South Africa. During her time with PATH’s Market Dynamics program, she made significant contributions to projects across sexual and reproductive health, cervical cancer, malaria, diabetes, diagnostics, medical devices, product innovation, and human-centered design. She also worked for the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Ethiopia and Lesotho, leading an array of HIV and TB projects and working closely with the respective Ministries of Health. She began her career in health care consulting at Huron Consulting Group in Chicago, Illinois.
Throughout her career, Ms. Gowda has focused on expanding access to health commodities to individuals living in emerging markets. Her achievements include supporting successful product introductions, such as a self-injectable contraceptive method (DMPA-SC), an innovative bundle for diabetes commodities, a highly sensitive rapid diagnostic test aimed at malaria elimination, maternal health diagnostics and medical devices, and a micronutrient surveillance tool. She costed DMPA-SC introduction and scale-up plans for seven countries, and the implementation of these strategic plans played a critical role in shaping the market health and sustainability for this contraceptive method. She presented the methodology and lessons learned associated with this work at the 2022 International Conference for Family Planning.
In her role as the lead facilitator for the DMPA-SC Donor Consortium, Ms. Gowda drove consensus among five global donors (BMGF, CIFF, FCDO, UNFPA, USAID) to develop a roadmap to achieve market sustainability for the contraceptive.
More recently, Ms. Gowda oversaw efforts related to supply security and local manufacturing of diagnostics, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work helped to expand relationships with new development finance institutions, impact investors and donors.
Recognized for her leadership, Ms. Gowda was selected to be a member of the 2022 North America cohort in the WomenLift Health’s Leadership Journey, an initiative designed to support women through the challenges and opportunities of advancing to senior leadership positions in global health. She holds a Master of Science in Public Health from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
