Shibanand has been working in the social development sector for the last 16 years and in an organization named Ekjut for the last 11 years. The work in Ekjut is a community mobilization initiative through women’s groups called the Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) to improve mother and child health and nutrition. He has been involved in this organization since the beginning in 2004 and was District Manager of one of the districts where the first trial involving the PLA process was done. With a good result of reduction of newborn death by more than 30 % in 3 years time, this initiative was scaled up in 5 districts across 2 states, Jharkhand and Odisha and he was the State Manager for Odisha. After the intervention was published in The Lancet in 2010, he has presented its findings and the findings of the interventions after that, in various national and international forums. Some of them include the Perinatal Society of Nepal (PESON) conference in Kathmandu in 2014 and the Global Maternal Health Conference in Mexico in 2015. This PLA intervention is being scaled up by different agencies and State Governments; and Government of Odisha has scaled it up in 15 high burden districts.
He is a trainer for the state resource pool for this and he has developed manuals and various training aides for this program. As a senior team member Mr Rath is involved in mentoring the team, managing and supervising projects and writing proposals and reports. His involvement in policy advocacy has been in engaging with government and strengthens the service delivery part and presents their work in different forums and discuss with the local health officials regarding the participatory method that they adopted and how best it can be used for better service delivery. He is involved in data analysis with statistical packages such as SPSS and have received training on qualitative and quantitative research methodologies given by visiting faculties and research scholars from University College, London.
He has attended a Short course on Epidemiology at Christian Medical College, Vellore, which dealt with analysing epidemiological studies. He also attended a course named ‘Making Pregnancy Safer’ for health managers organised by Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies, Sree Chithra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology Thiruvananthapuram, India.