Biography

Aly Visram is a Consultant within the Health portfolio of OPM's Social Policy Programme. He has an MSc in Public Health in Developing Countries from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and focused his studies in the fields of epidemiology and evaluation. Much of Aly's current work is in Kazakhstan, where OPM is conducting a randomised-controlled impact evaluation of a cash transfer programme aimed at pre-school children, pregnant women and disabled children. Aly has been involved in the design and testing of complex quantitative instruments, developing data collection and data entry protocols and in the training of survey teams. Aly has been involved in similar work in Kenya in the UNICEF-funded Orphans and Vulnerable Children and the DFID-funded Hunger Safety Net cash transfer impact evaluations. He recently conducted a review of demand-side interventions (which include, cash transfers) to inform the design of a DFID-funded cash transfer programme for pregnant women in Zambia and contributed to a recently published comparative analysis of the payment systems often employed in cash transfer interventions. Aly is also familiar with the analysis and production of living-standards-type surveys and worked on the Tanzania Household Budget Survey (2007/08), with the Statistical Offices in Zambia on the 2010 Living Conditions Monitoring Survey, and in Rwanda on alternative techniques of poverty measurement. He was a member of the evaluation team that conducted an institutional evaluation of the World Health Organisation’s Health Metrics Network and conducted in-depth country case studies of the national health information systems in Cambodia and Sierra Leone. Before joining OPM, he worked in Pakistan for two years with the Aga Khan University and lived in Tanzania while working with community-based health organisations in rural areas.