Apoorva Jadhav

Apoorva Jadhav is a nonresident scholar in the Carnegie South Asia Program. She is a demographer, family planning and reproductive health expert, and policy strategist with two decades of experience in evidence-based policy formulation, and large-scale strategic resource allocation. Her work centers on translating complex global demographic trends—specifically fertility changes, population aging, and migration—into actionable frameworks for governments and international institutions. Jadhav’s expertise lies at the intersection of technical demography and global governance. She served as the technical lead for the U.S. government’s diplomatic delegation to the United Nations Commission on Population and Development.

Jadhav is currently a senior fellow at the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), where she spearheads the communication of high-stakes demographic research to influence the global discourse on low fertility, infertility, and population aging. Concurrently, she serves as a consultant for Demographic Futures at the William H. Gates Sr. Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, focusing on strategic visioning to integrate demography into national development priorities.

Previously, she served as the senior demographer and statistician at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). There, she was the agency’s chief demographic expert, providing strategic oversight for demographic surveys, analyses, and studies in USAID-assisted countries. She helped manage USAID’s multi-million dollar investments in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS-7 to DHS-9) and international censuses (with the U.S. Census Bureau). She helped provide leadership on the linkages between population dynamics and socioeconomic development, shaping agency-wide policy and programmatic priorities on topics ranging from global health to migration. Prior to her role at USAID, she was a National Institute on Aging postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. There, she contributed to the health and retirement study, focusing on the design, analysis, and policy implications of aging, with a specific focus on India.  

Jadhav has published extensively on reproductive health, gender roles, socioeconomic development, and the application of demographic data to policy-making. She is also the creator of the Substack Demography Matters, where she analyzes demographic shifts and their implications for a new country each week. She holds a Ph.D. in demography from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPH from Emory University, and a BA in public health from Johns Hopkins University.