Save the Children is the world’s leading independent organization for children. It brings communities, civil society, governments, businesses, and donors together to achieve lasting change in the way the world treats children.
Wendy Woods and Elliot Vaughn
BCG has been a proud partner of Save the Children since 2006, collaborating on a wide range of strategic, operational, and organizational issues. We work side by side with Save the Children on its highest priorities, which include building medium- to long-term strategies and improving effectiveness and efficiencies in country operations, fundraising, and advocacy.
Our partnership supports the following efforts:
“Following publication of the UN OCHA Global Humanitarian Response Plan in early May, all INGOs rushed to supplement the report with their own organizational global response plans for COVID-19. Save the Children needed to identify the impact of COVID-19 on children and synthesize our response approach. It was the first time the movement had published such a comprehensive plan, in terms of both content and geography.
“To ensure we reflected our global footprint, we had to review over 80 individual country plans. With each plan being over 30 pages and following no template, it was important we work intelligently and effectively to meet our deadline. My experiences as a BCG consultant prepared me to synthesize information quickly and extract insights from complex, messy data. Further, BCG’s emphasis on ‘speed to output’ trained me to work quickly without losing relevant detail and rigor; this skill set enabled me to extract financial targets and beneficiary counts from each individual country response plan, making Save the Children one of the only INGOs to publish such data at the country level.”
—Joji Syed, BCG consultant and Save the Children secondee
“I joined BCG as a generalist after receiving my MBA and was fully prepared to build my consulting toolkit by helping clients address their business needs across a variety of sectors and industries. But I wasn’t prepared for the sheer breadth of opportunity available to have both commercial and social impacts.
“I feel so fortunate to have been a part of Save the Children’s journey. Through our global partnership, case teams are in a unique position to use our experience and networks to support client leadership in designing and implementing a wide range of projects, from refreshing the overall strategy to integrating sustainability and diversity across the movement. It has been very rewarding to see how BCG skills and resources can help a global nonprofit focus on what it does best—improving the lives of children around the world.”
—Karen Zhou, BCG consultant
“I had the honor and pleasure to work as a secondee to Save the Children in the East Africa Regional Office in Nairobi. Fresh off two BCG projects aimed at helping a pharma company prioritize its portfolio strategy, I was tasked at Save the Children with redesigning its entire global Country Strategic Planning process and supporting 50+ country offices through the process. I was amazed to find that having worked on a few similar BCG projects equipped me with the expertise to make a huge impact in Save the Children’s organization.
“I worked hand in hand with the great people in the regional and country offices to streamline the planning processes to focus more on long-term goals, aligning capacity and resources toward the most important initiatives to help ‘every last child’ survive, learn, and be protected.”
—Andrew Bosson, BCG principal and Save the Children secondee
“BCG Digital Ventures partnered with Save the Children’s Migration and Displacement Initiative (MDI) to see how we might use digital solutions to help displaced children and their families. This unique collaboration brought together the deep sector knowledge of staff across the Save the Children organization, BCG’s social impact and business expertise and DV’s unique approach to discovering and building ventures. Our seven-week innovation generated four digital concept propositions focused on improving children’s mental health, learning/teaching, youth entrepreneurship, and ethical apprenticeships.
“Flexing the traditional, business-world-focused approaches of BCG and DV to meet the needs of the social impact sector was a unique challenge. It was exciting to see how bringing together this group of people from different backgrounds and locations allowed us to understand the problem space and leverage the DV approach to discover and build ventures. As we continue to work with Save the Children, we hope to see these products come to fruition in an affordable way to ensure long-term sustainability.”
—Nick Brown, product lead and co-GM of the BCGDV Fantasia Innovation
The digital revolution is upon us. BCG Managing Director & Senior Partner Pranay Jhunjhunwala explores how this modern technological firepower can be used to address the most deep-rooted global issues.
Forced displacement disproportionately affects our most vulnerable: children. BCG & Save the Children have developed a tool that prepares governments, donors, and agencies to better support displaced people in an extended crisis.
