Nisha Santhar

I've spent the last ten years doing work that's really about people as much as it's about process: building relationships, keeping a dozen moving parts on track, and making sure what got promised actually shows up.

Right now, that means leading programme management for finance and banking clients across APAC and beyond at Alpha Development, juggling stakeholders, timelines, and delivery across multi-country initiatives. Before this, I ran executive education programmes at NUS's Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and before that, regional programmes at ARROW, working across the Asia-Pacific women's rights sector. Different worlds, honestly. But the same thing kept being true: figure out what people actually need, then make it happen.

A few things I've gotten genuinely good at along the way:

◦ Running multi-stakeholder, cross-border programmes start to finish: brief, delivery, reporting, the whole arc

◦ Being the person who holds it all together: clients, internal teams, delivery partners, especially in public sector, education, and development settings

◦ Building client relationships that turn into repeat work, not just one-off projects

◦ Staying steady when budgets, timelines, and people are all moving at once (which, in this line of work, is most days)

I hold postgraduate degrees in Social and Public Policy (University of York) and English and Sociology (Lancaster University), plus a SkillsFuture Programme Management Certification. I'm fluent in English and Malay.

I'm based in Singapore and open to programme management, partnership, and ecosystem coordination roles across the region.

If you're working on something that needs someone who actually cares whether the delivery is good and the people involved feel taken care of, I'd love to hear about it.