Fish Welfare Initiative is Considering International Expansion (and an invitation to apply!)

By haven @ 2026-09-04T05:34 (+21)

The main takeaways for our fellow EA people are:

• We (FWI) are considering expanding to a third country (beyond India and China). This will likely be another country in South or Southeast Asia.
• To initiate this, we are hiring for a Global Growth Manager/Lead.
  • If you are the sort of person who is good at both desk prioritization research, as well as field scoping vists, we encourage you to apply (deadline: September 20).
• As always, we are extremely grateful to the EA community and its ideas for making our impact possible. If you have input on our work, we encourage you to comment below.
• If you're interested in FWI's previous forrays into expansion, see our recent post: Expanding and Contracting: Our Global Growth History.

The rest is cross-posted from our blog.

Our Vision and 2026 Goal

As part of our strategic re-evaluation in 2024, we set a new organizational vision. It envisioned that:

“FWI is running projects at scale in multiple contexts, particularly Lower and Middle-Income Countries, that are cost-effective and evidence-based.”

This vision formalized our plan to create an organization capable of developing and implementing promising interventions in multiple high-production lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs). The hope was that we could get compounding benefits from our knowledge —for instance, lessons learned in developing cost-effective farm programs might be directly applicable to their counterparts in Bangladesh.

This vision statement did not, however, answer the question of when to expand. For that, in 2024 we also set our two-year strategic framework, which we call our 2026 Goal:

“[By the end of 2026, we aim to] have developed and validated a program that meets our minimum thresholds for cost-effectiveness, scalability, and evidence-based impact.”

Our 2026 Goal was, in effect, a gate on international expansion. Expanding means asking donors for substantially more money, and we didn't think we should do that until we had proven ourselves to be an organization capable of achieving certain thresholds of success.

Current Status of 2026 Goal

It’s nearly September of 2026—we’ve had about two years to work on this goal. How have we done?

It has been a mixed bag:

• Our farm program, the ARA, has a cost-effectiveness of only about half of what we’d like it to be (10 vs 20 fishes helped per dollar). This, as well as scalability, are our main hesitations with this program, though we still see paths to resolve them by the end of the year. For instance, one idea we’re considering is that of “Farm Ambassadors”: contractor staff who are paid per farm visit and who would allow us to decouple farm visits from lab analysis, significantly lowering costs.
  • On a positive note, our recent Outcome Evaluation demonstrated that the ARA is having a positive effect on water quality, which we consider to resolve most of the question of evidence base.
• Our satellite-based water quality project, though we invested heavily in it, never showed sufficiently promising results.
• Our feed fortification project is still ongoing. We are expecting study results back in September, and hoping for the best. If these results are positive, we will launch a pilot program surrounding feed fortification (though to note, such a pilot is unlikely to conclude before the end of the year, still causing us to miss our goal).
• We consider our other smaller and upcoming studies, such as chill kill, to have promise but to be less likely to enable us to attain our 2026 Goal.

And so overall, as noted in our 2025 Year in Review, we have been strong on study execution but light on breakthroughs. We are continuing to hope that we will find such a breakthrough in the next few months—most likely either via our feed fortification study or via something like our proposed “farm ambassador” system. However, this is uncertain—it is uncertain whether we will achieve our 2026 Goal by the end of 2026.
 

Why Expand?

We are considering various arguments for and against whether now is the right time to begin expanding:

In Favor of Expansion

• Greater confidence in existing work: Our work in India, which accounts for about 80% of our budget and leadership time, is relatively stable. One important factor here is that we have been able to hire two senior Indian staffers in the last 6 months.
  • Our work in China continues to operate largely independently under the leadership of Siddharth, meaning that significant time from other leadership staff is not required.
• Our unique position: Unfortunately, there are not many organizations focused on fish welfare in Asia, despite the massive numbers of individuals involved (roughly 90% of farmed fishes live in Asia). We believe we represent one of the best opportunities for donors looking to address this issue.
• Increased funding in the ecosystem: Significant new funding may soon be entering the animal movement. Expansion could take advantage of this.
• New opportunities from new countries: New contexts may enable us to find more cost-effective interventions. For instance, an intervention or scaling mechanism that hasn’t worked in India might work in, say, the Philippines.

Against Expansion

• We haven’t cleared our own stated thresholds: Much of the purpose of our 2026 Goal was to inform us when we had developed organizational infrastructure that was good enough to warrant expanding to another country. As noted above, we have not yet achieved this goal—we have yet to develop a program that meets our thresholds for cost-effectiveness, scalability, and evidence base. And so expanding now would mean exporting a model we aren't yet sufficiently confident in, and going against our former strategic plans.
• India-specific vs broader barriers: One argument for expanding is that new countries may be different from India, and so challenges we could not overcome in India (e.g. lack of consumer interest) may be overcome elsewhere. However, it may also be the case that the bottlenecks we face are not India-specific, but rather org-specific, or general to fish welfare in LMICs. For instance, this might have been the case with our satellite imagery project: Sufficiently accurate technology appears to not exist to make this project viable in any country.
• Undue influence of funding: FWI’s philosophy has always been that we make decisions based on what we think is best for our beneficiaries, independent of what donors want (and we have been fortunate that our proposed plans have always aligned with enough funders to make this work). However, in this decision, we are taking increased availability of funding into account.
• Dilution of focus: Expansion could dilute our focus from our work in India and China, despite the fact that there is still infinitely more work that could be done in either of these countries.

Why Scope Now

It’s unclear which of the above arguments carry more weight, though our leadership team is leading towards expansion. However, the immediate decision facing FWI is not whether to begin expanding, but whether to begin scoping.

For scoping, the case is more clearly affirmative: It is much less expensive than full expansion, preserves our option value, and is a prerequisite for future expansion anyways. 

And so we are now hiring a Global Growth Manager to lead the scoping work. We aim for them to begin work by the end of the year, spend the first 6 months of 2027 conducting field visits and research, and by June have a recommendation for which country(ies) to expand to. We will then make a decision, in part based on the status of our work in India (e.g., our 2026 Goal), as to whether to initiate expansion.

If that decision is positive, we will begin hiring local staff and building an operation, taking into account the many programmatic and operational lessons we have learned in India. We will aim to develop the same kind of on-ground, evidence-based, and scalable interventions we have focused on in India.

Where to Scope

We are expecting to limit our focus to other countries in Asia. This is because of a) the large numbers of fishes farmed in this continent, and b) this is the region where we have built our expertise. Countries we are particularly interested in include Bangladesh, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

In the future, we may be interested in expanding to other lower- and middle-income countries, such as in Africa or Latin America. But we expect that will only come after we have proven ourselves capable of successfully expanding and executing in various Asian countries first.

Get Involved

If you are:

• An adventurous traveler with research experience, we recommend you consider applying to our Global Growth Manager/Lead Role.

• Living in one of the countries we might scope, we encourage you to reach out. We expect to hire local contractors to take part in the scoping, and we will also be interested in partnering with local organizations.
   

   

We hope that this scoping and potential expansion enables the next stage of development of our organization, one where we begin operating cost-effective projects across various geographies and improving the lives of far more animals than we are currently able to reach. We will be reporting regularly on our progress.