Evidence Action's Board of Directors has appointed Danielle Bayer as the organization's next Chief Executive Officer, effective May 3. She succeeds Kanika Bahl, who led the organization through nearly a decade of growth and will continue to support it as a member of the board.
Danielle joined Evidence Action in February 2025 as Chief Growth Officer and has served as Interim President since September 2025. The board conducted a rigorous external CEO search, but the most revealing interview process turned out to be the six months Danielle had already spent leading the organization.
"This was, in many ways, the longest and most thorough interview process we could have asked for," said Shikhar Ghosh, Chair of Evidence Action's Board of Directors. "Through the course of Danielle's interim presidency, it became apparent that she was an exceptional leader for Evidence Action's future. Her strategic clarity, operational rigor, and her deep commitment to our values — we saw it every day, in real time."
Danielle brings nearly two decades of experience building and leading organizations at the intersection of global development and evidence-based impact. As Managing Director at Founders Pledge, she helped grow pledged giving from $1 billion to $7 billion and giving to highly effective charities like Evidence Action by more than ten times. She previously served as a director at the Tony Blair Foundation-US and Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative-US. Her commitment to effective giving is reflected in her board roles at Founders Pledge, IDinsight, and The Agency Fund, organizations at the frontier of evidence-based philanthropy. She holds an MS in Management from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a Master of Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School.
Proven interventions, delivered at scale
Today, Evidence Action reaches more than 530 million people across 11 countries, unlocking an estimated $23 billion in global productivity.
Many of the health interventions that could save the most lives are already proven to work. What’s often missing is the infrastructure and partnership to deliver them at massive scale. We close that gap by identifying where cost-effective solutions are underdelivered, building government partnerships to reach entire populations and holding ourselves accountable for results.
That approach has produced programs operating at a scale few global health organizations have achieved. Deworm the World has helped governments deliver more than 2.4 billion treatments across India and Africa, with delivery increasingly transitioned to government partnership. Safe water programs have reached approximately 8 million people with chlorination, helping address a crisis that kills more than 1.2 million people annually. Equal Vitamin Access prevents an estimated 1 million cases of anemia annually through weekly iron and folic acid supplements. And Syphilis-Free Start is tackling one of the most preventable causes of stillbirth and neonatal death by integrating syphilis screening and same-day treatment into existing antenatal care systems.
Our Accelerator identifies which evidence-based interventions are primed for scale . A growing pipeline of emerging interventions — eyeglasses, prenatal vitamins, immunization support — is advancing through rigorous evaluation of cost-effectiveness, scalability, and government partnership potential before program launch.
Kanika Bahl's legacy
This track record was built under the leadership of Kanika, who joined Evidence Action when the organization was three years old and in a fragile early chapter. Over nine years as CEO, she built a health-forward strategy, created the Accelerator, and transformed the organization from a precarious start-up into a 950+ person institution delivering scaled impact across 11 countries.
“Though the numbers and programs are impressive, what Kanika built extends beyond this,” Shikhar said. “She created an organization with the discipline to keep asking whether our work is having the greatest impact possible, and the ambition to act on the answer. The strong foundation and culture she built will serve us exceptionally well for the future.”
Kanika will continue as a senior advisor to Evidence Action and will remain on the organization's Board of Directors. She is also leading the AI Access Initiative (2AI), an effort currently incubated at Evidence Action dedicated to ensuring AI’s benefits reach tens or hundreds of millions of people in poverty in the Global South.
“I am so proud of the growth journey of Evidence Action, and the bright future ahead under Danielle’s excellent leadership,” Kanika said. “I have every confidence that the best years of this organization are ahead."
Read Kanika's full reflection on her tenure and Evidence Action's next chapter in her farewell letter.
What's ahead
Danielle steps into the CEO role at a moment of opportunity to meaningfully increase the number of lives we reach and save in the next few years. Syphilis-Free Start is ready to accelerate, building a global coalition with the ambitious goal of eliminating the majority of congenital syphilis. A growing pipeline of emerging interventions is advancing toward that same potential, a subset of which could achieve the scale and depth of impact of our largest programs.
The enabling conditions match the ambition. Donors committed to cost-effectiveness are not retreating from global health. They are looking for exactly what Evidence Action offers: rigorous evidence, effective delivery, and sustainable impact.
"We have a real opportunity to dramatically increase our impact in the next few years, delivering more of the interventions that most improve people's health and lives, “Danielle said. "The evidence exists. The funding exists among those who care most about impact per dollar. Our job is to execute with ambition and discipline."
Danielle’s first months as CEO will be grounded in listening. She will visit programs in Africa, meet team members across the organization and launch a strategy process to define Evidence Action’s next chapter.
"Evidence Action exists to ensure proven, inexpensive interventions reach the people who need them most,” she said. “That clarity of purpose is our foundation, and it's what I'll build upon."