Panagora Group

Name: Panagora Group
Address: Washington D.C., DC, US
Telephone: +12025808318
Price range: $

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A woman-owned small business providing novel and integrated solutions in health, development, and le 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.

09/23/2026

It's always a pleasure to be with other employee-owners to learn from each other, share successes, and think about how to move ESOPs from being a best-kept secret to a well-known business solution that makes capitalism work for more people. Our CEO Betsy Bassan and communications expert Madeleine Pryor led a session this week at the Mid-Atlantic & Carolinas Chapter of The ESOP Association Fall Conference in Raleigh on “Going Beyond the Bottom Line to Drive Business Success." They shared how companies can intentionally build a strong ownership culture that translates employee ownership into increased business success—a virtuous cycle that benefits employees, the company, and founders.

Drawing on Panagora’s own journey as an employee-owned company, Betsy and Madeleine shared five practices that have shaped our approach:
✅ Aligning leaders around a shared vision for employee ownership
✅ Educating employees about the ESOP and the business
✅ Involving employee-owners and creating meaningful opportunities for input
✅ Informing employees through consistent, transparent communication
✅ Repeating key messages and reinforcing ownership throughout the employee experience

👉 Our key takeaway: The ESOP creates ownership. Culture activates it. ✨

When employees understand the business, see how their work contributes to its success, and have meaningful opportunities to participate, employee ownership can become more than a benefit. It can become part of how you build a stronger, more resilient business.

Thank you to Mid-Atlantic & Carolinas Chapter of The ESOP Association for bringing us together and organizing fantastic sessions with inspiring speakers.

07/18/2026

Education comes alive when we step beyond the classroom and experience the world through new places, cultures, and perspectives. On Nelson Mandela Day, we celebrate a leader who believed that education is one of the most powerful tools for changing the world.

At Panagora, that belief inspires our work with universities to create immersive learning experiences that help students engage with South Africa's rich history, vibrant culture, and complex development landscape. By connecting with local leaders, communities, and institutions, students gain perspectives that simply cannot be replicated in a lecture hall.

Visits to places such as the Apartheid Museum and the Nelson Mandela Exhibition encourage students to reflect on resilience, reconciliation, servant leadership, and the power of individuals to create meaningful change. These experiences help future leaders understand South Africa's past and prepare them to approach today's global challenges with curiosity, humility, and purpose.

As Nelson Mandela so powerfully reminded us: “It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation.”

This Mandela Day, we celebrate the experiences that broaden perspectives, deepen understanding, and empower future leaders to make a meaningful difference in their communities and around the world.

05/28/2026

The Philippines has long been a key hub for Panagora’s global health and monitoring and evaluation work.

Since 2018, in partnership with the U.S. government and local stakeholders, we have helped bring evidence to life across health and development programs, linking monitoring, evaluation, research, learning, and adaptive management to drive more effective health programming, stronger collaboration, and continuous learning.

A few things we learned along the way:

✅ Collaboration structures matter; when local organizations, implementing partners, government stakeholders, and donors have regular forums to share evidence and solve problems together, adaptation happens faster.
✅ Learning only creates value when time and resources are invested to act on it.
✅ The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that adaptive management and virtual learning approaches can sustain program effectiveness even during major disruptions.

These lessons have been grounded in our strong organizational partnerships, trusted networks, and commitment to locally led solutions. We are grateful for the opportunities we have had across our long history in the Philippines, as well as to the colleagues and partners who continue to advance evidence-based global health programs across the country and the region.

04/21/2026

On Earth Day, we’re reminded that sustainability is inseparable from health, livelihoods, and resilience. 🌍

From evaluating climate‑resilient urban services and renewable energy initiatives to assessing biodiversity conservation, sustainable agriculture, and disaster risk reduction, our work shows that acting on the evidence is central to building resilience in a changing world. Our evaluations and assessments have reinforced key lessons:

✅ Sustainable outcomes depend on strong local institutions and governance that engages across sectors
✅ Environmental investments deliver the greatest impact when they are integrated with livelihoods, health, and equity
✅ Data are most powerful when they inform adaptation, in addition to ensuring accountability

Earth Day is a moment to reflect, but also to keep learning, adapting, and acting.

04/16/2026

When organizations are managing complex, multi-country portfolios, it's critical to have the right people in place at the right time. Our core business is recruiting, mobilizing, and sustaining high-performing professionals across complex portfolios to achieve success.

Through our work across Latin America, Asia, and Africa, we have provided institutional support by recruiting, deploying, and managing high-performing technical experts across priority areas, including:

1️⃣ Global health security and supply chain management
2️⃣ Governance, conflict resolution, and social inclusion
3️⃣ International trade and economics
4️⃣ Strategic information and program operations

Over the past four years, we have deployed and managed more than 600 contractors annually, growing steadily to meet client demand while maintaining exceptional retention.

What does that look like in practice?
✔️ Recruiting and seconding technical experts directly into government teams to fill critical capacity gaps
✔️ Managing a blended workforce of long-term staff and short-term specialists to meet evolving needs
✔️ Providing end-to-end support—from sourcing and onboarding to performance management and backstopping
✔️ Rapidly scaling teams up or down in response to shifting priorities and funding

In our work in Southern Africa, we engaged dozens of technical experts and supported multiple U.S. government offices, while continuously adapting staffing and support models as needs evolved.

We’ve also demonstrated surge capability under pressure, mobilizing personnel to meet urgent requests, verify large volumes of data, and deliver within compressed timelines without disrupting ongoing operations. ✅

👉 The takeaway: effective institutional support is about building a flexible, high-quality workforce that can hit the ground running, be adaptable, and sustain results in complex environments.

04/09/2026

As we celebrate World Health Day, we are encouraged by the recent signing of the America First Global Health Strategy MOU in Cambodia. The first MOU signed in Asia, this highlights a critical shift toward government-to-government strategic health partnerships. For Panagora and our network in Cambodia, it’s an encouraging step!

Our experience with the USAID Cambodia Malaria Elimination Project 2 (CMEP2) reinforced the next chapter in global health security, where investments in one disease can help build more resilient and integrated health systems across a range of health threats.

Panagora’s role in Cambodia was focused on managing knowledge, targeting the work, and strengthening collaboration and efficiency, including:

✅ Supporting the translation of data into actionable insights via joint indicator analysis, after-action-reviews, and other accountability and collaboration tools
✅ Refining demographic and geographic targeting at the province level, ensuring health interventions reached specific high-risk populations, including forest workers.
✅ Advocating knowledge management capacity-strengthening for provincial health directorates and operational district levels as part of the program exit plan.

👉 Moving Forward:
The 2026–2030 implementation phase of the new MOU offers a chance to refine these systems further. We look forward to supporting global health security goals in Cambodia and beyond, focusing on the rigorous monitoring, learning, and communications necessary to keep communities safe and resilient.

Read the full announcement here: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/04/charting-a-new-phase-of-trump-administrations-america-first-global-health-strategy-in-asia-beginning-with-cambodia/

02/05/2026

Panagora Founder & CEO, Betsy Bassan, delivered a keynote at the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) Women’s Summit this week. Her message? “Let’s use our voices to share a best kept secret: employee ownership is a powerful tool to drive business success while building more durable, equitable, and innovative businesses.”

Audience feedback confirmed the shared belief in the room that expanding employee ownership can address current, deep-seated, and divisive national issues around income and wealth gaps. How? By giving employees an. opportunity build wealth and retire comfortably through Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs.

Research shows that ESOP companies are more productive, more profitable, and more resilient, while employees see higher wages and significantly greater retirement savings. Employee co-owners witness the wonder of employee ownership; how it lights up energy among employees, buoys business success, creates resilience in tougher times, and builds wealth that lets employees live better today and in retirement.

For Betsy, this is about making capitalism work better for everyone. Aligning purpose with profit. Values shared across the ESOP community.

That’s also why Panagora co-created the NCEOX Inclusivity Fund with NCEO and the Employee Ownership Expansion Network (EOX), to help other women- and minority-owned businesses explore and adopt ESOPs and build ownership cultures that drive business performance, equity, and innovation – basic American values!

As Betsy said in the roundtable she also facilitated “leverage your voice as an owner,” don’t keep employee ownership a best-kept secret. Share the story. Expand the model. Help more people build wealth. Address the inequality that is bedeviling our world. And both use and contribute to the Inclusivity Fund to advance that agenda.

Learn more about our work and the Inclusivity Fund: https://www.nceo.org/inclusivity-fund

01/24/2026

On World Education Day, we’re reminded that education extends far beyond classrooms. From the Philippines, to Uganda, to the Dominican Republic, our work using evidence, reflection, dialogue, and co-creation to adapt and improve has helped people gain access to quality education. At Panagora Group, we focus on how institutions, funders, and communities learn because when learning is embedded in systems, it becomes a powerful driver of equitable and lasting change.

01/18/2026

Today marks Panagora's 15th anniversary and almost a year since the major upheaval to the international development field. Since then, we’ve been rethinking the way forward, much like a startup but with deep capability and many vehicles. Sadly, we’ve had to say goodbye (for now) to many talented employees and consolidate to a core group to lead our pivot. We have deepened our advocacy for small business and women-owned business, making sure our voices are distinct and preserving America’s engine of growth—U.S. small business—for the future of international assistance.

Throughout this tumultuous year, we were buoyed by the commitment of our community to the incredible work we’ve been doing together these many years. Panagora is proud of our efforts to advance global wellbeing and promote innovative ways to engage the private sector in projects that have improved lives around the world. From our founding, we have put local actors in the lead, ensuring a sustainable legacy. We look forward to continuing to achieve Panagora’s mission of making our world a better place for good—doing good and making it stick!

04/17/2025

🚨 News! >> Today, Small Business Association for International Companies is launching a new organizing effort to reshape the future of international assistance centered around American small businesses.

This campaign – “American Businesses for International Assistance” – aims to re-establish bipartisan support for the issue and will include outreach to both Republican and Democratic Members of Congress.

As owners who partnered with the Trump administration during the first term, SBAIC members have an important story that has been largely left out of the debate over international assistance.

Read more about the campaign and get involved here: https://www.smallbizforamerica.com/

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Telephone

+12025808318

Website

http://panagoragroup.net/

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