Message from the Cofounders
In our 2023 in Review, we characterized that year as one of setup: It was the year where, more than any before, we realized that our current programs probably didn’t meet our (at that point intuitive) thresholds for further scaling. In response, we launched our new R&D Department, with the goal of developing new interventions that would warrant broader scaling.
2023 wasn’t just strategically a year of setup—it was physically one as well. In it, we constructed the experimental test ponds that would later be used to run future studies Left photo: FWI staff Vivek and Gandhi measure one of these freshly dug test ponds, as observed in June 2023. Right photo: The filled ponds, as then used for our Feed Fortification Study, as observed in August 2024.
If 2023 was the year of setup of a new, R&D-focused strategy, then 2024 was where we began its execution. A flawed, complicated, and messy execution certainly, but overall a promising one. In terms of program development, 2024 was the year where we:
Ran multiple studies to develop new or improve current interventions, such as our studies on satellite imagery and feed fortification.
Investigated more scalable strategies with our farm program, such as predictive models and adjusted visit frequency.
Tested collaborations with a promising partner to assess their ability to scale welfare interventions.
We believe these outcomes will be significant in continuing to improve our farm program, as well as to develop new interventions, over the coming years. Another particular highlight of 2024 was formalizing FWI’s long-term vision—working in multiple lower/middle-income countries executing interventions that are scalable, cost-effective, and evidence-based—and more precisely defining what minimum program scaling thresholds we will need to achieve to get there.
And last, even though in 2024 we put significantly more resources into R&D than impact generation, we are proud of the estimated 1.2M fishes whose lives we estimate we improved in 2024, mainly through water quality improvements. All of our work ultimately comes down to this number.
We invite you to dig more into the details of all of this in our post below (it’s written to be skimmable!). As always we are grateful for the support of everyone who makes this possible.
Your FWI cofounders,
Tom and Haven
Most of the FWI team, pictured here at our strategy retreat in October at our office in Eluru, India.
Countries of Operation
The bulk of FWI’s work in 2024 occurred in India. The only other country in which we had significant operations was China. These two countries were previously selected based on their potential for impact, specifically regarding the scale, neglect, and the perceived tractability of the welfare issues faced by farmed fishes within them.
We intend to scale to other countries at some point, but not until we have developed our programs in India to meet our minimum program scaling thresholds. See more in 2024 Themes below.
As a reflection of where we spent the majority of our resources, this post primarily discusses our work in India. For a reflection on our specific activities in China, see the section FWI’s China Work in 2024 below.
2024 Key Outcomes Attained
The following are the key outcomes FWI attained over 2024:
R&D Studies Launched and Completed: We completed a field study on satellite imagery, largely completed (results pending) a field study on feed fortification, and are about halfway through a study on the dissolved oxygen (DO) tolerance levels. Towards the end of the year, we also launched field testing of a new welfare assessment protocol for Indian major carps. We expect these to be significant in informing the future direction of our programming. For more on the complexity of these, see the 2024 Themes below.
Our staff measuring and observing fishes as part of the Feed Fortification Study. Note that live fishes were kept out of water for up to about a minute for the purposes of measurement and observation—a stressful procedure for them, but one we believe was the costs.
Farm Program Expansion and Impact: Our farm program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture, expanded from about 105 active farms at the beginning of 2024 to now ~155 active farms. We also improved the lives of an estimated 1.2M fishes via this program. Even though we remain primarily in a program development stage, it is still important to us to implement some programs already—for impact, knowledge-building, and momentum reasons.
New “Pull” Incentive Initiatives Launched: In 2024, we experimented with crowdsourcing as a way to spark innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges in fish welfare. Through our Stunning RFP and Satellite Imagery Innovation Challenge, we invited external experts and organizations to propose creative ideas for currently unsolved problems. These initiatives stem from the recognition that, while we don’t yet have all the answers, others might—and with the right incentives and outreach, we can inspire the development of impactful solutions. Launched in the final quarter of the year, both initiatives are still in their early stages, and it’s too soon to gauge their success. However, we remain excited about these two serving as tracks to develop a program that has the potential to meet our Minimum Scaling Thresholds.
Policy and Other Stakeholder Advocacy: With our policy work in India, in 2024 we continued to form key relationships with governmental agencies and progress towards a more pro-fish policy ecosystem—contact us if you’re interested in learning more. We also tested a partner NGO as a mechanism for implementing welfare improvements, which we believe may be useful for implementing future programs at scale.
Left photo: Program Associate Ravi collecting a sample at an ARA farm, from which we will later measure ammonia. Right photo: Our staff pictured with an ARA farmer (middle).
2024 Themes
The following were the key themes of our programming and operations in 2024, along with some of the various lessons learned from them:
1 - The Development of our 2026 (Two-Year) Goal
The largest strategic theme in 2024 was the development of what we call our 2026 Goal: Specifically, by the end of 2026 we intend to have “identified and field-tested an intervention that is sufficiently cost-effective, scalable, and evidence-based to warrant scaling to impact fish welfare on thousands of farms in India.”
We break down cost-effective, scalable, and evidence-based into some of the specifics as for what they mean to us in our Minimum Scaling Thresholds. To give some examples, by 2026 we intend to have piloted an intervention that:
Has projected cost-effectiveness at a scale of a minimum of 20 fishes per dollar (we are currently at about 10).
Has the potential to impact fishes on thousands of farms.
Has been efficacy-tested, field-tested, and has a rigorous M&E plan in place.
The idea behind these thresholds is to guide our decisions about if and when to scale a program. We think of our current interventions—for instance, the farm program, satellite imagery, feed fortification, stunning, etc.—as all being tracks that have the potential to meet these scaling thresholds, tracks that we execute in parallel to maximize our chances of getting a “hit”. Once one intervention reaches these thresholds, we expect to transition resources from developing a wide array of interventions to just focusing on the one (or few) intervention(s) that we have proven to be cost-effective, scalable, and evidence-based.
You can read more about this in our strategy post last November.
2 - A Primary Focus on Program Development
We continued to primarily focus on developing new and existing programs, rather than scaling them (for the algorithmically inclined, we continued to focus on exploring, rather than exploiting). This is in large part due to the fact that fish welfare work in high-producing lower and middle-income countries is vastly underinvested in, and we see one core value of our work as developing the welfare interventions today that can be scaled tomorrow. It is also due to uncertainties with our current farm program, particularly around how scalable it can be while relying on in-person staff visits. At the same time, we remain committed to our longtime vision of becoming a charity focused on execution and scaling. We intend for our 2026 Goal to provide us more direction—as well as a more firm deadline—here.
3 - Generally Improved Efficiency
Compared to prior years, 2024 felt like a more efficiently and professionally run year. We ran more and larger studies than before, our farm program ran more efficiently than before, and we had fewer big org restructures (only one in 2024, compared to two essentially 180° turn ones in 2023). This was also reflected in our goal attainment, which was significantly higher than that of 2023 (see more below).
FWI staff at an operations brainstorming session at our office in Eluru, India.
4 - Improved But Still Challenging R&D Process
One of the longest trends of our work is that our R&D process improves each year: For instance, compare the first study we attempted (failed) to run to the studies we ran this year. 2024 felt like the first year our R&D work was operating at full capacity, and we think the interventions we have researched this year are much more likely to bear fruit than any we have researched before.
However, 2024 was still far from perfect: Of the four R&D studies we ran, none of them went as smoothly, or attained results as conclusively, as we had planned: The Satellite Imagery Study had later complications with its initial positive results; the Feed Fortification Study suffered from lice outbreaks and other confounding factors (final results still pending lab assessment of physiological indicators); the Dissolved Oxygen (DO) Tolerance Study suffered from a mortality incident (more on that below), etc. These latter two studies also significantly overran their timelines, and we are now wrapping them up in the first half of 2025.
Why the complications? In one part, they are due to our still limited experience in running these types of field studies. In another, they are also due to carp farming in India being an inherently messy industry, with few obvious answers or easy tests to be run. We hope and expect that the challenges we have confronted this year will enable us to more effectively run such studies in 2025.
5 - Ethical Questions with Live Animal Studies
All of our R&D studies involve working with live fishes, and two of these studies—namely the Feed Fortification and DO Tolerance ones—even involved rearing or keeping them ourselves (note that fishes were released into their natural habitat at the conclusion of our studies). Unfortunately, both of these studies experienced mortalities: 25 fishes dying from issues in our DO Tolerance study, and a lice outbreak that led to 3 fishes dying in our Feed Fortification Study (plus at least 6 who died from bird predation, though as far more would have died from predation in the wild we’re unclear how to feel about this).
Our fish welfare experts on the team tell us that these sorts of incidents are inevitable when working with a large number of animals, but we also continue to have conflicted feelings about putting individuals at risk for some greater good. Ultimately though, we believe we are on the right path to develop interventions that will help many more fishes in these contexts in the future. We will continue to do all we can to mitigate these future risks, even though we will never be able to eliminate them entirely.
Our Project Associate, DP, taking an ammonia reading at night during an acclimatization stage in our DO Tolerance Study. Night monitoring, as well as other improved safety measures, were implemented after the initial incident that killed 25 fishes.
FWI’s China Work in 2024
2024 was largely an interim year for our China work, where we were significantly restrained by not having any full-time Chinese staff, and thus only dedicated about 0.75 full-time equivalent (non-Chinese) staff towards this work. Our main activity in 2024 was supporting the World Conference on Farm Animal Welfare in Beijing, specifically by co-leading the Aquaculture and Fisheries section. We also collaborated with ICCAW, our partner in China, by providing feedback on their large yellow croaker welfare standards.
We are expecting 2025 to involve more activities for our China work, as we are now hiring a China Program Director to facilitate collaborations there. We expect our strategies in China to continue to be—unlike our work in India and likely future countries—top down: collaborating with local organizations and local universities, consulting with companies, supporting research, etc. We remain committed to working in China, as, given that it farms over half the world’s farmed fishes, it is likely the most significant country in the world for fish welfare.
Our staff member Dr. Cerqueira presenting at the Aquaculture and Fisheries session, at the
World Conference on Farm Animal Welfare in Beijing.
Operational Information
The following may be of interest to those interested in the more technical aspects of FWI’s operations. All budgets, objectives, and key results (OKRs), as well as some other documents, can be found on our Transparency Page.
2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
OKR Average Attainment | TBD | |||
Quarterly OKR (“QKR”) Average Attainment | 64% | 60% | 84% | TBD |
Weekly Goal (“Big Goal”) Average Attainment | NA | 62% | 72% | TBD |
Staff Size | 15 FTE (full-time equivalent) as of January 2022 | 21 FTE as of January 1, 2023 | 20 FTE as of January 1, 2024 | 23 FTE as of January 6, 2025 |
Annual Budget | $830K budgeted |
OKR and Goal Attainment
In line with our value of transparency, FWI publishes its OKRs, as well as regular updates on our attainment of them. Our 2024 OKRs may be viewed here: fwi.fish/okrs-24. Our average attainment in 2024 was 68%, which was a significant improvement from the 51% of 2023. We generally prefer our OKR attainment to be around 70–80% (we don’t want it to be much higher than that, because we would take that as a sign of goals not being sufficiently ambitious). Our quarterly and weekly goal attainment also improved from 2023.
Staff Changes
We began 2024 with 20 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff, and ended it with 23 staff. Our annual turnover rate in 2024 was about 12%, compared to 30% in 2023. About 9% of that turnover was involuntary; the rest, was voluntary. This is an area that has improved since 2023.
We were pleased to welcome the following staff members in 2024: Sirisha Perikala (Accounts Associate), Praveen Reddy Kona (Program Manager), Roshan Sheik (Project Associate), and Ravi Teja Asleti (Program Associate).
New staff who joined FWI in 2024, pictured clockwise from top left: Sirisha Perikala (Accounts Associate), Praveen Reddy Kona (Program Manager), Roshan Sheik (Project Associate), and Ravi Teja Asleti (Program Associate).
2024 also saw one of our co-founders, Tom, switch to part-time work at FWI. In the other part of Tom’s time, he now works for The Mission Motor, which provides pro bono training to organizations to increase monitoring and evaluation skills in the animal movement.
Financials
Our budget increased from $750K in 2024 to $830K in 2025. The main reasons for this increase were launching new exploratory programs (specifically our stunning initiative) and revamping our China work. Costs also generally rise each year (e.g. we generally make annual inflation adjustments on most staff salaries).
We spent about $590K in 2024. The reasons this was significantly less than the $750K we had budgeted included:
We did not proceed with hiring for the positions proposed in the R&D and Programs (previously ARA) Departments.
Similarly, we postponed hiring plans for the China project (we are now advertising for this role).
We ended up pursuing fewer R&D projects than we had budgeted for. Specific projects that were planned and later cut included the model farms project, a project to improve the welfare of fishes in reservoirs, and a project to develop an automated feeder. Broadly, we ended up not doing these because they ended up looking less promising when we looked into them further.
To address this issue of over-budgeting, we have added a steeper discount to our 2025 budget than previously. Learn more in our 2025 Budget.
In terms of FWI’s revenue, we have the following to report:
We raised $670K in 2024.
This consisted of individual donations from about 300 different people or entities.
95% of our total revenue by amount came from donations of over $1K, particularly from large grants from Animal Charity Evaluators, the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund, Open Philanthropy, and several private individuals.
We earned $8K from a high-yield savings account (FWI partners with Stifel for this, and we are quite pleased with their support).
As of the date of publication of this post, we have about a $490K funding gap remaining for 2025. Potentially interested donors can review our donation page for more information.
Also as of this post’s rough date of publication, FWI currently holds $246K in liquid and non-liquid assets. See our recent balance sheet for more information.
Culture
FWI conducts regular culture surveys to better understand how staff perceive organizational culture. We conducted two last year: one in January, and the other in October. The results of these were published on our blog.
Board
FWI had the following board members serving in 2024:
Laura Gough (president)
Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla (secretary)
Nick Hollman (treasurer)
FWI’s legal board meets quarterly, and the board meeting minutes may be found on our transparency page.
Note of Gratitude
Though we include this just about every year, it’s important enough to warrant repeating: We are tremendously grateful to everyone who has made this work possible. This of course includes our donors, our partner farmers, our corporate partners, and our NGO collaborators. It also includes our friends and family, who support us endlessly and, for many of our staff, endure their loved ones being away for long periods of time.
A special shoutout also goes to:
The RMJ team for all the accounting and legal support
Jayasimha for endless advice and good cheer
Kathy (Haven’s mom) for processing all of FWI US’s mail
The DVARA team for being excellent partners
Gauri for making all of our policy work possible
ICCAW for making all of our work in China possible
The many aunties in Eluru and Rajahmundry who cook for us and keep our office tidy
Levi for the investment support, and for always giving it with a smile
The Shrimp Welfare Project team for being our close collaborators and friends
Laura, Andrés, and Nick for serving as supportive board members
Karolina, Aidan, Sam, Rainer, Vicky, Shreya, Kyle, James, Harshit, James (#2), and Jan for taking the time to visit—you are all welcome back at any time!
Ambitious Impact for continuing to support us and let us work out of their office. It all began with you guys!
We will also always be grateful to all our fellow animal advocates: all the other humans who are working, volunteering, advocating, and/or donating in order to bring about a more humane world. You all inspire us, you give us meaning and community, and you give us hope that this large project of animal advocacy will, someday, prevail!
Speaking of fellow animal advocates: staff from Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) pictured alongside FWI staff.
Our Project Manager, Teja, releasing fishes into their natural environment following the conclusion of our Feed Fortification Study.
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