Sylvana Quader Sinha is Chair of the Board at Praava Health, which she founded in 2014 and led as CEO for nearly 11 years. Under her leadership, Praava became Bangladesh’s first fully integrated outpatient healthcare platform, advancing her mission to democratize quality medical care in emerging markets. She is a recognized leader in building resilient businesses that unlock new economic potential.

After studying economics and philosophy at Wellesley College, Sinha received her JD from Columbia Law School, as well as a Master’s in Public Administration / International Development from Harvard's Kennedy School. She began her career as an international lawyer and consultant working across the public and private sectors. Her work bridged the most advanced capital markets with the least developed frontier economies. Ultimately she served as a foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008. In these years, Sinha built up a rare and valuable on-the-ground understanding of how to stir the vast consumer potential in emerging markets.

A family emergency in 2011 awoke Sinha to the fact that, despite consumer spending power and desire, no amount of money could buy quality care in Bangladesh. This inspired her to found Praava Health — meaning “beam of light” — with the hope of bringing radical change to Bangladesh’s healthcare sector. After raising millions of dollars in funding from high profile angel investors, Sinha opened Dhaka’s Praava Health in 2018. Today, this state of the art one-stop-shop healthcare system - headquartered in a neighborhood synonymous with upward social mobility - serves nearly a million patients and is Bangladesh's fastest-growing healthcare brand. In changing the lives of so many Bangladeshis, Praava became an important beacon for healthcare startups and provided a clear model for improving health care for the billions of people rapidly entering the middle class in emerging markets

Sinha’s singular vision resulted in the opening of a totally new method of healthcare delivery in Bangladesh - sparking a new market for consumer services and an ecosystem around it. Praava was designated a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer in 2021 and a Global Innovator in 2023, and a Fast Company World Changing Idea in 2020. The Praava Health model has been widely studied at Harvard and Columbia Business Schools. It has also been highlighted in studies funded by the Gates Foundation as a model example of next gen inclusive, innovative and sustainable healthcare companies playing a critical role in addressing the rising burden of chronic diseases in lower middle income countries and possibly the world. In 2023, Praava was also named one of 100 Meaningful Businesses combining profit and purpose to help achieve the UN Global Goals by EY and Hogan Lovells.

A columnist for Forbes, Sinha has appeared as a contributor on CNBC, and has written for the Harvard Business Review, the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as many other popular and academic publications in the United States and globally.

More on Sinha's entrepreneurial journey is available in this article she penned for the May/June 2024 issue of the Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2024/05/the-ceo-and-founder-of-praava-health-on-reimagining-care-in-an-emerging-market.