Dr. Suresh Balakrishnan

Regional Technical Advisor, UN Capital Development Fund

Suresh Balakrishnan is UNCDF’s Regional Technical Advisor for South Asia. He works with UN Country teams in Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal and leads UNCDF’s local development finance practice in the region with programmes on fiscal decentralization, women’s economic empowerment, climate resilience finance, municipal finance and local economic development. His work focuses on expanding local fiscal space to enable national governments to work with local governments and make targeted investments to achieve the SDGs, supporting the shift to blended finance and non-grant financing instruments, and facilitating UN Country Team partnerships to use innovative finance.

Dr. Balakrishnan has over two decades of association with the UN system in several agencies, in the fields of governance reform, fiscal decentralization, municipal investment finance, public accountability and public administration reform across several countries across Asia. Suresh has a doctoral degree in management and led the Public Affairs Centre in Bangalore, India for a decade during which he helped to develop Citizen Report Cards which emerged as a global best practice in public accountability. He has published extensively in international journals and was on the faculty of the International Programme for Development Evaluation, jointly conducted by the World Bank Group and the Carleton University during 2005 and 2015.