Nidhi Ralhan is the Programme Manager for Food Action Now. Food Action Now is a new special initiative co-led by the Food and Land Use Coalition and its partners, aiming to catalyze greater ambition from state and non-state actors on food systems reform in a time of crisis. Food Action Now will be launched in earnest in 2023. In this role, Nidhi is responsible for the day-to-day management of Food Action Now, which brings together seven different organisations – the Food and Land Use Coalition, the Just Rural Transition, the UN High Level Champions, Chatham House, the Global Panel on Agriculture, Food Systems, and Nutrition, the Food Forward Consortium, and ClimateWorks – ensuring information flows, programme delivery, and a positive team spirit.

Nidhi's journey in the development sector started in 2009 with United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in New Delhi, where she worked in the Social and Human Sciences (SHS) and Communication and Information (CI) Sector. At UNESCO, she worked on a multitude of global development challenges ranging from migration to cultural heritage, press freedom to rights for persons with disabilities and sustainable development. While being part of intergovernmental processes and negotiations, Nidhi found herself developing a new found passion to curate creative, scalable and impactful solutions to the interlinked developmental challenges.

In furtherance to her passion to work towards development challenges, Nidhi joined the Food and Nutrition Security, Enhanced Resilience project of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, New Delhi, contributing to SDG 2, 3, 5 and 6 through an integrated nutrition sensitive approach. She lead various project packages including designing and managing a web and mobile based ICT tool to promote nutrition sensitive agriculture practices amongst the 1,00,000 frontline workers of Department of Women and Child Development, Government of Madhya Pradesh, Community Nutrition Gardens (CNGs) and project gender strategy. To scale up the advisory tool, she then facilitated establishment of a Memorandum of Understanding between Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), the apex body for managing research in agriculture, and GIZ India.

In 2021, Nidhi decided to back her extensive field experience with an enhanced education qualification in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies, University to Sussex.