The Puggle: October 2024 edition

Dana Schmidt | November 18, 2024

You may have noticed that we’ve been rather quiet on our blog lately.

That’s because we’ve been busy putting the final touches on an expanded strategy for Echidna Giving and growing our team to deliver against that strategy.

We’re thrilled to formally share our expanded strategy here, which is also reflected in updates on our website. We are calling this our “yes/and” strategy because it encompasses all the work we were doing under our previous strategy and then some.

So what’s new? Under this expanded strategy, we are:

• Including a new thematic area around primary-school-age girls, recognizing that mastering foundational skills on time is critical for girls to stay in school and succeed
• Increasing our emphasis on marginalized girls — including girls who are out of school — for whom challenges have been most persistent
• Looking for opportunities to foster critical thinking on gender and power through schooling systems
• Formalizing a concentrated geographic focus on East Africa and India, with experimental work in West Africa and Pakistan (picking countries with the highest need for girls’ education in terms of school access, school completion, and learning outcomes where we are likely able to make an impact)

Because we are growing our grantmaking budget in the coming years, we are able to add these areas of work while retaining our earlier themes. That means we will continue supporting gender equity in and through early childhood education and adolescent life skills. We will also continue funding a robust ecosystem through grants in support of leadership, evidence, and advocacy in girls’ education.

How will we be putting this strategy into action? We have hired five new staff members in the last four months. We are thrilled to have these folks onboard — you can find more details in their bios here:

• Dennis Nyakundi, Program Associate, Africa portfolio
• Melizsa Mugyenyi, Program Officer, Early Childhood Development and Education, Africa
• Arjun Sanyal, Program Officer, Early Childhood Development and Education, South Asia
• Allison Gross, Program Associate, South Asia portfolio
• Dulce Preciado, Grants Services Associate

Please dive into the strategy document to learn more about our planned approach and how we arrived at it. The document also includes a series of FAQs about how we approach our grantmaking.

We hope to be back to more regularly scheduled Puggle posts soon, so watch this space!