Sanjana Bhardwaj
Email: sanjana.bhardwaj@gmail.com
Area of expertise provided as part of the CIS Affiliated Consultant Network:
- Student Wellbeing: Protection, Safety & Security
Sanjana Bhardwaj, a social worker by profession, is well recognized as a child protection and family rights advocate promoting evidence-informed prevention, early support, and diversionary strategies. She has extensively worked with culturally and liguistically diverse populations making sustainable changes in systems, policy and service delivery that are contextually appropriate and fiscally responsible.
Sanjana offfers advisory services in child rights, early childhood development, child safeguarding, and online safety to government entities, UN agencies, non-government entities and academia in the Middle East, Australia and Asia.
In recent years, Sanjana has worked with senior leadership in several United Arab Emirates government entities developing strategic and business plans for prevention of child abuse, social inclusion of people with disability, social care and benefits services provision, human rights, and licensing and regulation of development professionals. Sanjana contributed to the country wide strategic road map for child protection, child rights law, federal child abuse reporting hotline, and a smartphone application for reporting child abuse.
She has been instrumental in preparing the minimum standards child protection policy for schools, victims of abuse policy, family wellbeing conceptual framework. Sanjana has given advice on ECD policy and legislative gap analysis, parental leave policy, family dispute policy, screen exposure policy and parent-friendly label policy.
Sanjana has also worked as a Visiting Faculty at the Zayed University and at the Rabdan Academy in Abu Dhabi. Her current work around emotional safety and resilience in the context of early childhood development and digital wellbeing is notable. Since January 2022, she has been advising on the Digital Wellbeing in Early Childhood Project, funded by The Walt Disney Company and being implemented across the United Arab Emirates. In her latest assignment as an assessor, she was involved in evaluating and improving the performance of Dubai government entities.
Founder of STOGOCOMP (https://stogocomp.com/) and Safe AI Cup (https://safeaicup.com/), a freelancer, she also provides pro-bono advisory services to Emirates Safer Internet Society, a non-government organization.