Vijayalakshmi Iyer

Vijayalakshmi (Viji) Iyer is Director, Policy (Scale) at J-PAL South Asia. She leads ASPIRE, the organization's evidence-to-scale unit, driving strategy, fundraising, portfolio management, and the codification of ASPIRE's end-to-end scaling approach. She oversees a portfolio of major scale-ups spanning rural livelihoods, early childhood education, emissions trading, and gender equity, and holds a seat on J-PAL South Asia's Senior Management Team. In this role, she unified ASPIRE's governance and institutional architecture, secured new philanthropic capital, and deepened state-level partnerships to accelerate evidence-to-policy pathways. Prior to her current role, she served as Associate Director, Policy (Scale-Ups) at J-PAL South Asia, where she built and led the ASPIRE scale-up function from the ground up. Before joining J-PAL South Asia in 2023, Viji worked with STIR Education as Global M&E Head, where she developed and led the global monitoring and evaluation strategy for government-led behavior change programs at scale.

She has also held roles at Quest Alliance and Azim Premji Foundation, working across education, livelihoods, and systems change in India.