Dr Kartika Bhatia is an assistant professor in Education Research at Durham University and a research affiliate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London. An applied economist, she studies how contextual factors across schools, families, communities and local governance systems shape young people’s life outcomes, and how policy and practice can better support inclusion, protection, and wellbeing.
Previously, Kartika was Research Director at ASPIRE, one of India’s largest education NGOs, where she led the design and evaluation of interventions reaching 1.5 million children. A central focus was preventing school exclusion, child labour, and early marriage through district-wide approaches that brought together schools, communities, and local authorities to identify, prevent, and respond to safeguarding risks. She supported the establishment and training of child protection committees and school management committees across 10,000 villages, strengthening local safeguarding responses and supporting school retention. She has also worked as a research economist at the World Bank on conflict and displacement in the Middle East and North Africa, and currently partners with UNICEF Innocenti on evaluating cash transfer programmes in Somalia.
Her work highlights the challenges facing marginalised communities and explores pathways for community-led change. Her current interests include child wellbeing in Indigenous contexts, community guardianship in the Global South, and adolescent safeguarding systems internationally. Methodologically, she applies causal inference methods, including RCTs and quasi-experimental designs, integrating administrative records, monitoring systems and survey data. She holds a PhD in Economics from Toulouse School of Economics.