Company Profile

Company Description:

Greetings! I am pleased to welcome all of you to Panagora Group. Panagora was launched in January of 2011. We entered the scene at a turning point in health and development. Everyone is eager to mix fresh ideas and innovations with what is now decades of knowledge on what works in development, so as to build a more effective, efficient and inclusive development future.

As a woman-owned small business, Panagora offers the best of all worlds—the efficacy, discipline and results orientation of the private sector, and proven ability to manage complex and fast-moving programs, with the special enthusiasm, agility, and creativity of a small business.

We are living in the midst of a development renaissance, where the importance of what we do is widely recognized. While we can trace this to some difficult times—in particular the tragic events of 9/11—there is now widespread agreement that helping other countries is a moral, economic, and security imperative.

This recognition has spawned an intense debate on foreign aid – on its purpose, delivery, and impact. The debate has helped clarify some of the precepts all development professionals hold dear: in particular, the critical importance of host country ownership, capacity-building, sustainability, and integration.

In health, these shifts have helped create a new consensus, crystallized in number of strategies and organizational reforms. Increasingly, we are leaving behind vertical programming, pilots that don’t reach scale, and efforts that bypass national systems, the local private sector, and communities.

Happily, there is broad agreement on the need to focus scarce talent and resources on systems strengthening; care that is delivered in an integrated and client-oriented way with true community engagement and ultimate impact; reaching scale; and stewarding knowledge so as to maximize cherished investments. We are being called upon to intensify innovation in development, through the use of new technologies, management of knowledge and in how we reach out to governments, communities, NGOs and the private sector.

Aid reform has put a spotlight on the value of additional voices and perspectives—and new sources of innovation—will bring. By emphasizing the need for expanded small business participation, it recognizes the important role international development companies play in achieving the objectives of foreign assistance.

These landscape shifts offer unique and exciting opportunities for experienced professionals and new approaches. Panagora provides both. With creativity, vision and a new outlook, Panagora provides proven management and implementation skills. Panagora offers out-of-the-box thinking in a way that utilizes trusted expertise and reliable systems. Panagora embraces the quest to make our development dollars ever more effective, by harnessing technology better, bringing cutting-edge approaches from the private sector such as social franchising and innovating with new community engagement approaches.

I extend my personal welcome, a hope that many of you will connect with Panagora and help to realize our dream of being an inclusive marketplace of ideas…a place that builds on the intersections between development players and disciplines…a place where ideas bubble and the best thrive and spread!

Warm regards,
Betsy Bassan
President and CEO