By Eric Stowe | CEO & Founder
I certainly couldn’t have predicted that as of the end of 2021, we would still be in perpetual lockdown and dealing with widespread disruptions everywhere we look. Over the last year, we’ve seen the combined impact of a global public health crisis, natural disasters, political tumult, rampant cost inflations, and worldwide supply chain issues that hit our programs and work extremely hard.
More than 50% of our global staff have had COVID-19 since its onset, despite the intense restrictions we’ve put in place (all have fully recovered, thankfully). Both the Seattle and Kolkata teams barely stepped foot in an office in 2021. Schools remained shut nearly the entire year in Kolkata; in Addis Ababa, our staff had to juggle their work with constantly evolving schools shifts and schedules. Transportation, importation, and the general cost of all goods have gone up exponentially. Despite that all, we reached our anticipated targets for the year while also making great strides forward across multiple areas.
We advanced the technology that helps to run our organization and make critical decisions about our impact. We saw quantum leaps forward in our menstrual health and behavior change programs. Our teams on the ground doing the hard work of major projects are now capable of doing five times more in 2021 than they were even two or three years ago. We’ve been able to routinize extensive infrastructure work in a way that previously we could only dream of. Our engagement with our government partners continues to be a major learning curve, and we are incredibly proud of the relationships we have cultivated. The schools continue to increase their populations at a staggering rate, and we continue to keep pace. We’ve started advising other organizations and new government partners how to deploy parts of our model on their own.
While 2021 has been one of our hardest years since starting the organization, it has also been one of our strongest, and I am deeply impressed by and thankful for our team members and their unyielding ingenuity.
— Eric Stowe, CEO & founder
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
