Vidya Diwakar is Deputy Director of the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network and Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. She leads a suite of multi-country mixed methods studies on poverty dynamics, vulnerability and inequality reduction in parts of East, West and Southern Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Her work focuses on gender-disaggregated drivers of poverty escapes, intersecting crises, and the role of multi-sectoral programming in supporting sustained poverty reduction.