Varsha Venugopal

As I mentioned, we have about 70% of our funds through venture philanthropy and EA-aligned funders.

The challenge for us is something I mentioned earlier on this valley of death, finding the right kind of funders who feel sufficiently convinced about our focus.

There is also the whole challenge of my time.

So at the moment, I spend about 50% of my time looking at fundraising and they're obviously...

you know, better ways I could be spending time on focusing on M&E and program and staff hiring, et cetera.

So I think from that perspective as well, if we were able to raise larger sums of funds that could cover us, then overall our organization could be more effective.

There was a short period of time when we had to pause our work because there wasn't clarity if routine immunization should continue.

And at some point, we also had to send a different set of messages because vaccinations were only happening in certain areas and not others.

So we wanted to make sure, again, from a do no harm perspective, we weren't sending people out.

without clarity on where they need to go for what.

Broadly, governments have been overwhelmed as well and focused elsewhere, and they haven't managed to focus as much as they would have liked on routine immunization.

But again, that has changed more recently when there has been more clarity that A, routine immunization is overall net positive and needs to continue even during COVID-related lockdowns, and B, that there has been these drop-offs over the last year and a half, and we need to catch up on that.

That's a good question.

I don't think I have it worked out.

I do think given we can make these advancements in terms of developing an operations manual and finding pathways to scale, our overall cost effectiveness may make it so easy for us to roll out fairly quickly and get governments to buy in and send out these reminders that

it would be solvable.

I mean, the plan right now is to find a way to solve it, whether it's through ourselves or through the government or others.

So we have been experimenting with different rigorous hiring processes and they seem to be working well so far.

If any listener has applied for any role in our organization, you would know you have an upfront testing process, which allows us to distill large number of applicants to a fairly small manageable number.

We have tried this recently for our tech and business development role.