Kanika Bahl is stepping down from her CEO role at Evidence Action, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that has scaled low-cost health interventions to reach more than 500 million people in Africa and Asia, to lead a new initiative within the organization focused on a different scaling challenge.
She’ll be leading the AI Access Initiative, a new effort — to be spun out as a separate organization — that will work to strengthen the AI for good ecosystem in order to ensure the technology delivers meaningful benefits for the 3.5 billion people living in poverty in low- and middle-income countries.
Under Bahl’s leadership, Evidence Action has grown into an 850-person organization and become a favorite among tech sector donors associated with effective altruism, a philanthropic approach that uses rigorous analysis to direct resources where they can do the most good. That stems in part from a disciplined focus on finding what Bahl calls the “unicorns” of international development — programs that are lifesaving, low-cost, evidence-backed, and scalable. Now, she is applying that same lens to a new frontier, trading the helm of a large, established organization for the challenge of building an AI-native effort from the ground up.