EA - Fish Welfare Initiative's 2023 in Review by haven

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Fish Welfare Initiative's 2023 in Review, published by haven on February 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Note that this is a crosspost from our blog. We're posting it here because the EA community has been instrumental from the very beginning to our organization, so perhaps in some way we're hoping to make you all proud of the work that some of your own have done.As always, all questions - however candid - are welcome!Message from our CofoundersIn ourprevious year-in-review post, we wrote about how we had made significant progress in developing our interventions, and how because of that progress we were finally beginning to see specific avenues forward to scale an intervention in India to help hundreds of millions of fishes. We are now one year later, and though it was a year of significant progress in many ways, that earlier analysis now seems premature.We began 2023 withambitious scaling goals to add 150 farmers to ourfarmer program, and to help an additional 1 million fishes. Unfortunately, largely due to increasingly-apparent limitations in our interventions, we fell short of these goals. These limitations also inspired twostrategicchanges over the course of the year, which, while needed, created instability that at times was challenging for our team. All of these things made 2023 feel like a challenging year for our programming, and for our organization more broadly.However, with ourlast strategic change, and with the improved capacity that came with it, we feel much better positioned to reach our ambition of being an evidence-based, extremely impactful and cost-effective organization. 2024 is thus beginning on a note of optimism for our team, with various causes for excitement: Our revamped research department andresearch plans; the issues we've identified (e.g.) and improvementswe made and are making in the farmer program; and the strategic realignment of certain roles to better capitalize on our staffs' core competencies.With all of this, we believe 2023 is best characterized as a year of unintentional setup for FWI. We didn't achieve most of the outcomes we intended, but we did build a number of foundations to enable us to achieve these outcomes more rigorously and sustainably this year and beyond. We also still did reach a number of important outcomes themselves, including scaling our farmer program toover 100 farms, finishing construction on experimental ponds to be used in future research with our local university partnership, and improving the lives of anestimated 450,000 fishes.There's no doubt that 2024 will be a critical year for our organization. This is the year where we'll see if our bet on increasing rigor and resources going into R&D will pay off with more impactful and scalable interventions.Thank you, as always, for your continued interest and support. We're excited to continue to share our progress with you.Tom and Haven, FWI CofoundersCountries of OperationFWI operated primarily in two different countries in 2023:India, our primary country of implementation, about which most of this post is written. Weselected India back in 2020 as our focus country, primarily because of the scale of farmed fish, the tractability we saw in our field visit of working with farmers, and our ability to hire people effectively there.China, where we conducted standard setting, field visits, and general early stage institutional awareness raising work. For more information on our current status in China, see ourrecent post.Key OutcomesWe believe the following are the key outcomes achieved by the organization in 2023:1 - An estimated 450,000 fishes' lives improved.Through stocking density and water quality improvements implemented by farmers in ourAlliance For Responsible Aquaculture (ARA), we estimate that we improved the live...