Members

Namratha Ramanan is finalizing a PhD in Psychology and Educational Sciences from KU Leuven, Belgium with an expertise in children’s and human rights. Her research has focused on familial separation in the context of live-in child domestic work in India. She is a highly skilled and creative researcher, specializing in designing and conducting qualitative research, conducting research with vulnerable communities, contextual interviewing, qualitative and quantitative data analysis and project management. She has conducted empirical studies with laborers in slavery and slavery-like situations in coffee plantations in India, child laborers in informal labor sectors like domestic work, elderly and child care provision, street vendors among others and desk-research on child labor in the cocoa sector.
Originally from India, Namratha has been involved with community-based, culturally relevant projects to address child and human rights violations, the most recent of which has been as a member of the working group of ‘Youth and Decent Work’ for Beyond Chocolate where her main contributions were to evaluate the effectiveness of human rights due diligence promises in self-declared sustainability protocols of chocolate manufacturing companies and development of indicators to evaluate further impact of programs aimed at reducing child labor in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
She also holds a MSc. in Forensic Odontology from KU Leuven, Belgium. This diverse educational background lends itself to her conducting projects from a pragmatic yet humanitarian approach.