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Ms.
Sivananthi Thanenthiran
Executive Director ARROW

Sivananthi Thanenthiran is currently the Executive Director of ARROW. Before joining ARROW, she explored different career choices in her life, which included teaching at a university, running a magazine across three countries and working for the United Nations. These different opportunities helped her discover her passion for writing and learning and form her ideals of working in partnerships and respecting diversity. She has co-written and edited books on sustainable development and urbanization as part of her work with the Urban Governance Initiative (TUGI), a regional project of UNDP. She was also a committee member of the Women’s Candidacy Initiative (WCI), which ran candidates on a women’s rights issues platform. Siva co-authored ARROW’s ICPD+15 and ICPD+20 Asia-Pacific monitoring reports and has written numerous articles and presented papers on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. She has been able to expand the work of ARROW to examine more closely the inter-linkages of sexual and reproductive health and rights with critical development issues such as poverty, food security, climate change and migration. Under Siva’s leadership, the organization’s working partnerships have expanded to 17 countries in the region as well as regional and global networks and organisations. She occasionally writes for local newspapers on issues that she thinks are of crucial importance in her country and views this as her contribution to the society in which she lives.

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