Our supporters are an inextricable part of the Evidence Action family. In this vein, we are sharing with you the letter our Executive Director, Alix Zwane, wrote to Evidence Action staff today reflecting on 2013 and the year to come.
Dear Evidence Action colleagues:
A note to wish you all a joyous, productive, and exciting 2014! The year ahead promises to be a big one for us; I’m looking forward to what we can accomplish together.
The leadership team was in Washington, D.C. last month in a rare convergence of events. We took that chance to reflect a bit on what we accomplished in 2013 and begin to talk about our goals for next year. In the remainder of this note, I want to share some of this with all of you.
Highlights of 2013:
Deworm the World Initiative
- We helped our government partners treat nearly 36 million children for worms, increasing their ability to live healthy productive lives.
- Priya Jha joined our team as India Country Director and has hit the ground running so that we can add two new states to our program in 2014.
- Dorothy Onyango joined our team as the National Program Director in Kenya and has brought her public health expertise to this nation-wide program.
- We received additional support from the END Fund and new funding from Good Ventures, expanding our donor partners.
- We were endorsed by GiveWell as a “top charity” which brought in a jolt of retail fundraising for our program and resulted in publicity for Evidence Action. Grace Hollister is leading our work to strategically deploy these resources in a way that maximizes their value for money and allows us to report to all our donors on our stewardship of the funds they have entrusted us with.
- We successfully wound down the Deworm the World organization and transferred governance and assets to Evidence Action, which now has full management and strategic oversight over the Deworm the World Initiative.
Dispensers for Safe Water
- We passed the “one million served” mark and are growing our program rapidly even as I write this, with Kenya in full-blown scaling mode, Uganda having transitioned from a pilot to a growing program, and with new pilots about to kick off in Malawi and Tanzania.
- We are working hard to raise the resources to keep us on our optimal expansion plan and are excited to continue to articulate what serving 25 million people in 2018 will look and feel like, for both us and our partners. Lalit Kumar, in his new regional role, will be taking this forward for us in 2014.
- This new support and clarity about our goals would not be possible without the new business plan developed this year with the hard work of Christina Riechers and her team.
Evidence Action
- Is launched!! Thanks especially to Karen Levy, our fun launch event in Kenya made it official… as did our signed management agreement with our sister organization IPA.
- Has employees; Matt Zimmermann and I were lucky to join in 2013, and look forward to many more official colleagues over the next year.
- Has a website! And even tweets…
The year has not been without its challenges and its ups and downs. We have said farewell to some dear colleagues, and suffered a real blow with the tragic events in Kenya in the fall. However, I can truly say that there has not been a day when I have not been proud of our efforts to “fill the gap” and felt honored to be part of this team who put their all into work each day and have shown resilience in the face of uncertainty and change.
2014 holds great promise for our programs and we continue to expand the number of people served with deworming and dispensers. We will roll out new materials intended to help you all do your best work and develop professionally. We will share our organization-wide priorities for the year and the individual priorities of the leadership team. We may even add some new ventures! I’m excited to see what each one of you contribute; it’s up to all of us.
Onward,
Alix