Expanding and Contracting: Our Global Growth History
- Haven King-Nobles
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
In line with our value of transparency, in this post we are sharing FWI’s history of expanding into—and pulling out of—new countries. We were motivated to write this as we are now considering expanding once more, and want to learn what we can from our past. We also hope this might be helpful to other organizations interested in questions of international expansion.
FWI’s Expansion History
FWI was founded in July 2019. The following are the highlights of our decisions to grow or contract over the years. We also include staff size breakdowns for the end of each year (though note that these become slightly more estimative in the earlier years).
For more detailed information on each year, see our Year in Review posts.
2020
In January, we began our initial scoping visits, with the goal of identifying a country to launch in. We (Haven) first visited Vietnam, and then India. We had been planning to visit other countries our desk research had deemed promising—including Bangladesh, China, and the Philippines—but the onset of the pandemic made this no longer viable. However, we felt that India appeared sufficiently promising, both because of the findings from our scoping visit and due to the staff we were able to recruit there, such that we made it our main focus. We thus hired our Managing Director of India (Karthik) and began work.
In the meantime, we remained interested in other Asian countries, and completed scoping reports on China and the Philippines with contractor staff.
2021
Our India work continued in full swing, growing significantly but also with many mistakes along the way (e.g.).
We hired an intern to work on our China work (Lu), who would later be promoted to a full staff member. She would lead our China work until 2023, although she remained our only Chinese staffer and the project largely operated independently from our India strategy.
2022
We continued our projects in India and China. We also became excited again about the prospect of international expansion, and so hired a former volunteer (Chiaw) to lead our work in the Philippines. We also hired two other local staff to support the project. Much of the motivation for expanding was that we believed that our India work was going sufficiently well—at that point, the main focus was on expanding our farm program—such that we could afford to divert organizational and leadership time to focus on a new country.
We ran a farmer engagement project for several months in the Philippines and it appeared promising (for instance, we had better traction with farmers than even in the early days of our India work). However, we still made the decision to cease the project. This was largely sparked by our Philippines Project Manager departing to do her Master’s (we are pleased to say that she now researches fish welfare at NYU!). Her departure also came at a time when we had become concerned that our India work wasn’t going as well as intended, meaning that we were hesitant to spare leadership staff to focus on countries beyond India.
2023
We continued our operations in India and China. In India, in keeping with the concerns we had had in 2022 about our program’s impact, we hired someone from the global health space (Paul) to develop and run our R&D Department. At this point, we began to devote the majority of our resources in India to R&D.
At the end of this year, we made the decision to pause our work in China, largely for staffing considerations. This brought us back to focusing on just a single country (India).
2024
In India, we continued to invest heavily in R&D, while still running and improving our farm program. Our China work remained largely on pause.
2025 to Present
We have continued to run our project in India to this day.
In China, we recommitted to our work and hired two new staff (Aijun and Ryan) and devoted more organizational resources to it. For better or for worse, this decision was largely made as a result of thinking, “If not now, then when?”
Our China project continues to operate to this day, now with three full-time staff (Siddharth, Aijun, and Ryan). Unlike our focus in India or the Philippines—which was on-ground farmer work—in China we have elected to focus on higher level relationship-building and industry outreach, although our strategy is still being developed.
Headcount
Year | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
Staff Size in FTE | 2 | 6 | 15 | 21 | 20 | 23 | 26 |
The above table shows FWI’s staff growth through the years. Early on, our team was people from various nationalities who would mostly support whatever country we chose to focus on. As we grew our operations in India, we later hired the vast majority of our staff there. This also includes a couple of staffers working in China and the Philippines over the years.
Reflections
Looking back, it’s clear we made many mistakes over the years. These included tactical, in-country mistakes (for instance, failing with our initial pilot study in India) but also mistakes about when and how to expand. For instance, we realistically weren’t in a position to expand to the Philippines when we did, and so we later had to walk that back and let go of staff.
We also probably should have either invested much more heavily, or not at all, in our China work in the period from 2021 to 2023. Instead, we chose a middle ground where we had only one staff member and a relatively small budget.
If we could go back, we would likely do the following differently:
Invest much more heavily in R&D in India starting on day one.
Not expand to other countries while our work in our primary country was very uncertain and leadership-time intensive.
Invest in hiring sufficient staff and new leaders such that we had the organizational capacity to manage complex projects in multiple countries simultaneously. Had we done this with staff in the Philippines, for instance, we might have still had sufficient organizational capacity to maintain and grow the project, even while our leadership focused more of their time on India.
These sorts of higher-level mistakes are largely failings of our leadership, mostly due to their (our) inexperience. The upshot, however, is that we have learned a lot about what it takes to launch a successful and sustainable in-country operation, and believe that we are in a better position now to do so.
However, we are mindful that we also believed we were ready to expand earlier in both China and the Philippines, only to later pause. In our next post, we discuss the pros and cons we are considering as we make this decision.
