Welcome to the Compass!

Welcome to the Compass, Chemonics’ technical blog. We are excited to start this new venture, our first corporate blog, because we strongly believe that sharing ideas and experience helps us learn, grow, and ultimately do better development.

When we began considering the idea of blogging, we asked ourselves a few key questions. First, why start our own blog? And second, what would we add to the conversation? The answers to both questions tie back to our mission of helping people live healthier, more productive, and more independent lives. To meet goals like ending extreme poverty, ensuring all children have access to an education, and that all people have access to quality healthcare, we will need to work together, share ideas, and learn from each other.

Learn. We strive to be a learning organization. The environments we work in, from Ukraine to Afghanistan to Colombia to Tanzania, are constantly changing and evolving. To ensure we are living up to our promises in those countries, we must change and evolve as well. The Compass offers us the opportunity to benefit as development professionals from each other’s experience and learning, and we hope to feature bloggers not only from our own staff worldwide but also from our local and small business partners, clients, and beneficiaries.

Share. As I mentioned above, the world is facing considerable challenges—extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and hunger, just to name a few. All of us committed to overcoming these challenges will need to collaborate and share our experiences to ensure we are moving in the right direction. A blog is a small part of that effort, but one we hope will contribute to a more “open-source” approach to development. 

Do better development. The larger goal is to do better development, to deliver more impact in the field, and to apply lessons learned as widely as possible. We hope this blog provides a platform for discussions of how we can accomplish those goals on the ground every day. We invite comment and feedback. Learning from one another’s opinions, knowledge, and experience will strengthen us as development professionals.

We plan to post a new blog entry each week, so check back often. You can sign up for an RSS feed to be informed via email when we post new entries, or follow us on social media. I look forward to seeing how we can combine our experience and knowledge to promote even better development.