Sylvana Quader Sinha

About Sylvana Quader Sinha

Sylvana Quader Sinha is the Founder and Chair of the Board of Praava Health, a healthcare platform built to improve health outcomes and patient journeys in emerging markets. She came to healthcare from international law, a career shift triggered by a single frightening day during a family visit to Bangladesh.

A Career Built in Law and Policy

Sinha earned a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Economics from Wellesley College in 1999, followed by a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and a Master of Public Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2004. She practiced international law at firms including Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Hogan Lovells, and worked in management consulting at both the Boston Consulting Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

She also served as a foreign policy advisor to then-Senator Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, giving her direct exposure to policy work at the highest levels of American politics before she ever considered building a healthcare company.

A Health Scare That Changed Her Path

In 2014, Sinha left her legal career after her mother faced a medical emergency during a family visit to Bangladesh for a wedding, when complications arose during an emergency appendectomy. That experience exposed gaps in the country's outpatient care system that Sinha, despite her legal and policy background, had never directly confronted before.

Rather than returning to her law career after the crisis passed, she used the experience as the starting point for a new venture entirely.

Building Praava Health

Sinha founded Praava Health in 2014, setting out to build Bangladesh's first fully integrated outpatient healthcare platform, combining clinics, diagnostics, and digital health records under one system. That integration addressed a specific gap in the market, where patients typically had to coordinate fragmented visits across separate clinics, labs, and pharmacies with no shared records between them.

Within five years, Praava Health had served 600,000 patients and was nearing cash-flow positive status, a milestone that reflected sustained demand for coordinated outpatient care rather than a one-time growth spike.

Leading for a Decade, Then Stepping Back

Sinha led Praava Health as CEO for nearly eleven years, guiding the company from its founding through its growth into a recognized outpatient care brand in Bangladesh. As The Business Standard reported, she transitioned from CEO to Chair of the Board in March 2025, moving into a governance role while handing daily operations to new leadership.

A Voice in Global Health Policy

Sinha serves as a board member of PATH, a global health innovation organization, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Those affiliations have positioned her as a voice in international conversations about healthcare delivery in emerging markets, extending her influence well beyond Praava Health's own operations in Bangladesh.