Leyre Sáenz Guillén MPA/ID 2027 spent her summer in New Delhi, India as a Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) Cultural Bridge Fellow for the Antara Foundation, where she worked to assess the Poshan Clinic, a program to combat childhood malnutrition through India’s existing health systems.
A development economist practiced in data analysis, Leyre had primarily worked on education policy in her home country of Argentina before coming to HKS. Moving into public health in India for her internship was a major shift, but she’d wanted an opportunity to go to India for years and was excited to have one.
As far as cultural comparisons, Leyre said she found many similarities between Latin American and Indian people: “social, warm, family-oriented, expressive, and always ready to share food.” She and her colleagues at the Antara Foundation tried each other’s favorite foods and cultural staples, from mate to Masala Lay’s.
During her internship, Leyre studied data on malnourished children the Poshan Clinic was working with, including statistics on their recovery, medicine availability, and care variation across health facilities. She then combined the data analysis with field visit observations of nurse-midwives, community health officers, and other frontline staff as they conducted health screenings and nutrition assessments, counseled families, and coordinated care.
She found that these field visits helped her connect the statistics to the realities and challenges on the ground.
“Behind every number, there is a system trying to work,” she said. “There is a frontline worker, a family, a clinic day, a register, a phone, a road, a rainy day, a translation, and a conversation. That was probably one of the biggest lessons of the summer for me: implementation is where policy becomes real.”
“Development is not only about designing programs or evaluating outcomes—it is also about understanding the systems, people, constraints, and relationships that shape what happens in practice.”
At the end of the summer, when working on her final project deliverables, Leyre wrote that “my economist brain and my field-learning brain finally met.” She presented an analysis of the Poshan Clinic’s model that would be used to determine its scalability, as well as a comparison of various sites within the program and recommendations to streamline practices and procedures across sites.
“I am leaving this internship with a much richer understanding of development work. Development is not only about designing programs or evaluating outcomes—it is also about understanding the systems, people, constraints, and relationships that shape what happens in practice.”
As she prepared to leave Delhi, Leyre exchanged gifts with colleagues who had become friends and even shared a traditional Argentinian dessert with them.
“In development and public policy, we often talk about institutions, systems, and implementation,” she wrote. “But being here reminds me that all of those things are made by people. People who share lunch, celebrate birthdays, lend you clothes, translate conversations for you, explain local context, and make space for you in their everyday routines. I came for an internship, but I am leaving with an incredible group of people I feel very lucky to have met.”
This article was originally published on the Women and Public Policy Program website on September 16, 2026. You can read Leyre's full blog about her experience here.
