Reflecting on 2021
Published on 2021-12-29 11:33:46IDA Team

Reflecting on 2021

Blog

Amsterdam, 29 December 2021 – With just a few days of 2021 left, I would like to take a moment to reflect on what was another challenging and inspiring year, which fortunately also brought new opportunities, insights, and highlights.

From container shortages, high transport prices, and increasing demand for PPE and related health products, COVID-19 continued to define our work in 2021. Through flexible thinking and dedication, I’m proud of the team for ensuring deliveries could be made to our partners worldwide, despite these global supply chain challenges.

While the pandemic raged on, unfortunately, so did humanitarian crises. Following the summer of 2021, IDA shipped over 2500 Inter-Agency Emergency Health Kits (IEHK) as well as Pediatric – Severe Acute Malnutrition (PED/SAM) kits to support the estimated 18 million people currently needing aid in Afghanistan.

Through new partnerships with Pfizer (for oncology), Kirk Humanitarian (for Multiple Micronutrient Supplementation) and Ferring (for Heat-stable Carbetocin), we bridged new gaps in access to essential medicines, and we look forward to building on these in 2022. Our most recent collaboration with Macro-Eyes, looks to take innovative steps toward valuable data and AI insights for our global supply chain.

Worldwide, sustainability gained a higher place on the global agenda, and all eyes were on COP26. At IDA Foundation, we continued our attention on creating more sustainable value chains. This included adding solar panels to our headquarters, and joining the SDG Ambition Accelerator programme. Our recent completion of our materiality assessment has helped us identify focus topics for sustainability, thereby laying the foundation for our sustainability roadmap towards 2030.

Now 2 days away from 2022, which is a special one: IDA’s 50th anniversary year. Last month, we kicked off the 50th anniversary stories campaign (see this first story from our distributor in Chad). With this campaign we hope to inspire people within and outside our network, and look ahead at how we will continue Building Healthy Futures in the years to come. (Get in touch with Marlies if you would like to add your story to this campaign!)

I’d like to thank the IDA team for their incredibly hard work over the past year, despite the challenging circumstances, and look forward to working together with them and all of our partners in this exciting new year ahead!

Wendy Eggen, CEO IDA Foundation