Wendy Janssens is Professor in Development Economics. She is director of the HERA institute (Health Economics Research Amsterdam), academic board member of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD), and research fellow at the Tinbergen Institute. She is also research advisor for PharmAccess Foundation.
She has extensive experience in designing and coordinating multidisciplinary research programmes that generate rigorous and locally grounded evidence to inform policy and practice. She works closely with national and international organisations, such as 100WEEKS, War Child and Amref Health Africa, as well as ministries of health and other government partners in various countries.
Her current research spans mental health, gender and social norms, poverty reduction, and the use of digital technologies to improve health and health care. Ongoing studies include research on maternal mental health and the digitalisation of maternal and child health care in Kenya; cash transfers, women’s empowerment and masculinities in Côte d’Ivoire and Rwanda; and the impact of mental health interventions for adolescent refugees in Uganda. In Pakistan, she studies how edutainment can change social norms and practices around child marriage and girls’ education. She also examines how AI-supported monitoring can improve care and reduce mortality among critically ill children in low-resource hospital settings in Africa.
Her research increasingly extends to the Netherlands, including the mental health impacts of cash transfers for low-income families and the consequences of HIV for mental health and labour market outcomes. As work package lead in a new NWO-funded consortium, she also studies how digital technology combined with social support can help reduce health inequalities in Amsterdam.
Her research programmes have received funding from, among others, NWO, DFID-ESRC, the European Union, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the World Bank and BRAC.
