Student Voices: Grounded in Grassroots, Growing in Global Advocacy

By Pragna Shekar MIDP'26

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Coming from India, I spent the last six years working with a non-profit focused on grassroots social behavior change, community advocacy, and challenging deeply held intergenerational norms around menstruation to improve menstrual health, hygiene, and overall well-being. While stigma and taboo shaped attitudes toward menstruation, I came to see it as a multidimensional issue, rooted in lack of access to education, hygiene products, healthcare, and WASH infrastructure, and deeply intertwined with poverty, gender norms, aspirations, and systemic inequities. This experience sparked a curiosity to better understand, frame, and problem-solve complex, entrenched issues, which led me to pursue the MIDP program. 

As part of the program, I am currently interning with UNICEF’s Global Headquarters in New York as a Child Poverty and Social Protection (CPSP) Intern. This role has given me the opportunity to be part of a global program team working to reduce child poverty and expand access to shock-responsive, gender-responsive, and disability-inclusive social protection in over 140 countries through evidence generation, advocacy, and policy support. I contributed across three key areas: research and analysis, communications and advocacy, and knowledge management.

One of my primary responsibilities was supporting the team, particularly in the lead-up to the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Sevilla, Spain, as UNICEF is a co-chair of the USP2030 financing working group. I helped coordinate side events and contributed to launching Sevilla Platform for Action (SPA) Initiatives in collaboration with many of UNICEF’s partners such as the ILO, World Bank, and member countries. I am also conducting qualitative synthesis and review on national policy commitments to reducing child poverty, reviewing how countries frame the issue in their national strategies and whether they prioritize it in domestic or international assistance, working towards writing a short policy brief on the same topic. A major component of my work involves co-leading the revamp of UNICEF’s internal knowledge management system for the CPSP team with my fellow intern from Sanford. We are redesigning and reorganizing the internal SharePoint site to better align with the team’s strategic narrative and improve accessibility for colleagues across global, regional, and country offices. 

This internship has deepened my understanding of how child poverty and social protection intersect within multidimensional and systems-based frameworks. I gained exposure to critical thematic areas such as gender-responsive social protection, disability inclusion, children on the move, systems strengthening, and programming in fragile and humanitarian contexts. Most importantly, I witnessed firsthand the complex processes of consensus-building and technical negotiation among multilateral organizations and governments, providing valuable insights into how evidence-based policy is shaped and implemented globally.

Coming from a grassroots background, this experience marked a powerful shift in perspective. I saw how field-level data and lived experiences are translated into global frameworks and policies, and later, the kind of advocacy and thought leadership that goes into working with member states to commit to global agendas and contextualizing them in a manner that is most aligned and impactful for them. This internship is making me explore and understand the existing social protection infrastructure in India, and how it can be better leveraged to integrate overlooked adolescent and youth issues. 

On a personal note, one of the most memorable parts of this internship was the chance to travel and work in New York City for the first time, exploring cafés around the UN Headquarters with brilliant colleagues and being inspired daily by their meaningful and often challenging work in a rapidly changing world on behalf of children worldwide.

Pragna Shekar came to Duke to study in the Master of International Development Policy (MIDP) program. She previously worked with Uninhibited, an India-based non-profit advancing menstrual health and hygiene in some of the most rural and tribal parts of India. Her experience encompassed facilitation, program implementation, training, curriculum development, impact assessment, communications, and fundraising.

The MIDP fellow is passionate about advancing the humanitarian development space at the intersections of gender, community building and localization. She is particularly interested in creatively using storytelling and data to bridge grassroots and community narratives with policy design and communication.