How FHI 360 has adapted to a year of chaos

For FHI 360, as for many international NGOs, this year has brought change at a scale that would scarcely have been believable just 12 months beforehand. “We have lost, over the course of this year, in a few months, half our revenue,” Tessie San Martin, CEO of FHI 360, said at a Devex Impact House event on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly. “But the good news is that leaves half our revenue, right? And so I’m going to take that as a positive.” She said that rather than rail against what had happened, the scientific research and application INGO was looking at ways to become more agile and do things differently. “The needs are still the same,” she said. “But the funding is a lot less. That means that honestly, we have to think about how we make every dollar that we mobilize work smarter and work harder. We need to think beyond usual charity models — I raise a dollar, I pay for my overhead, I do some good.” San Martin said the funding changes had forced FHI 360 to rethink its organizational structure. “We’re in the middle of a reorganization to enable us to be more nimble, to decentralize decision making more, and be more agile,” she said. Artificial intelligence is one of the main tools the organization is using to do that. San Martin said that her organization is using machine learning and AI to improve diagnostics and decrease reliance on frontline workers. It’s also using it to help staff work more efficiently. “Organizationally, we’re leaning into AI to try to make every single one of the remaining employees that we have smarter about how we work, better in using predictive analytics,” San Martin said. The organization is also thinking about using blockchain technology for various purposes, including making payments to hard-to-reach locations. “It’s not just a crypto fantasy,” she said. “There’s solid technology available now which is available to really transform things like our B2B systems.” One way or another, she said, it was vital that organizations were not scared to respond to a new reality where there was less money available. She said it was important that organizations did not give in to paralysis. And she said that it was time for the sector to think about how it should do things differently. “With less money in the system, we have had to rethink, top to bottom, how we’re structured, how we operate, what we focus on,” she said. “In this moment of scarcity and crisis, this is no time to be timid. This is a time to be bold and to lean into new and, at times, perhaps riskier ways of working, but we need to be leaning into it now, because the world needs for us to change.”