Time to celebrate: 2018 in review

This time of year, everyone is making lists. Gift lists, party food shopping lists, and lists of resolutions for the new year.

In our last post we mentioned that one of our key values is celebration.

At the end of every week, we take a moment to take note of everything worth celebrating and add it to our celebration wall.

At the start of 2018, our board and panelists set us three challenges:

1. Raise our profile

2. Deliver projects and share our findings

3. Diversify our funding base.

We took up these challenges and as the year comes to an end, we have a lot to celebrate!

Here is our end of year celebration list:

Projects

In March we held the world’s first data dive for urban sanitation. 23 data scientists joined us (nearly half were female and one third from minority backgrounds) for two days, and together we explored how data could be used to improve sanitation services in Lusaka, Zambia.

In April we collected data on household sanitation in Nairobi, Kenya. Once again, we partnered with Spatial Collective to train young people to map sanitation. We analysed and visualised the data our young mapping team collected on toilets in their community.

Since August, we have been designing and preparing for the launch of our first city data hub in Antananarivo, Madagascar.

Presentations

This year we have had a series of papers, posters and presentations published by the following institutions: Columbia University in New York; the Royal Society of Medicine; the University of North Carolina; and the University of Loughborough.

Partners

In January we launched a partnership with a BeyondMe team of consultants from Deloitte. They have helped us strengthen our value proposition. For 2019 we will be working with a new team of consultants from PwC on our monetisation strategy; we’ll tell you more about them in the new year.

Throughout the year, we have benefited from pro bono support to complete our accounts, refresh our website and replace our laptops.

This was also the first year we have received grant funding. The Vitol Foundation funded our data dive and Al Gore’s Generation Foundation gave us a grant toward our core costs.

People

This year we were joined by three new panelists in the form of Lars Schoebitz from Biomass Controls, Esther Shaylor from Unicef and Gemma Graham from Restless Development. We also expanded our board with the addition of two new trustees. All of them have already contributed an exceptional amount to team Gather!

Prizes

Winners:

- Forbes 30 social entrepreneurs under 30 in Europe

- MIT Technology Review 35 innovators under 35 in Europe

- Second prize at the World Government Summit’s GovTech series event in London

Finalists:

- Regional finalists for the World Bank’s Ideas for Action for financing the sustainable development goals

- Finalists for the Comic Relief Tech4Good for Africa award

- Finalists for the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award

We cannot finish this blog post without mentioning that another of our key values is gratitude.

We couldn’t have achieved any of this without our exceptionally generous philanthropy group and pro bono partners. Thank you all: you make team Gather what it is.