JSI Expert Tapped to Serve on SL@B Advisory Board

The Duke Global Health Innovation Center and VentureWell have invited JSI’s Leela Khanal to join the Accelerating Saving Lives at Birth (SL@B) advisory board. The 8-10 person board will provide the Duke and VentureWell team with insights into the evolving field of global maternal and newborn health, market contexts, and scaling strategies to inform program design and implementation over the next three years.

Leela will bring extensive experience to this position, having most recently served as Project Director for JSI’s  Chlorhexidine Navi Care Program (CNCP) in Nepal, which was funded by a first-round SL@B grant. In that capacity, Leela and her team worked with the Government of Nepal to scale up chlorhexidine for newborn cord care within the health system. In 2017, the program achieved national scale, reaching over 2.1 million newborns and saving an estimated 9,600 lives. Before leading CNCP, Leela supported the USAID-supported Nepal Family Health Program. In that role, she collaborated with the Government of Nepal to pilot a birth preparedness package that has become a national program.