Today, the Aid, Evolved podcast is officially 1 years old! To celebrate this milestone, we welcome a very special guest to our show. Jon Jackson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dimagi, a social enterprise that delivers digital solutions to improve lives in over 130 countries.
In today’s conversation, we chat with Jon about the influences, the people, and the ideas that took him from being an MIT grad on Wall Street to the trenches building health systems in Zambia. As we reflect on Dimagi’s founding story, we also hear Jon’s conscious decision to be an idealist and an activist – in spite of the existential doubts that plague him to this day. We hear how the mismatch between frontline aid workers and donors played out for Jon as he built and launched a touchscreen Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system in Zambia. From these formative experiences, Jon developed his philosophy towards high-impact technology. Then he baked that philosophy into the fabric of Dimagi.
This is also the story of how to shape a business to match one person’s philosophy of impact, particularly in the complex and often broken dynamics of the aid industry. How do you build an ecosystem for impact, one that can rise above the success or failure of any individual project or product? How do you build a company that can have a lot of failures, but ultimately when it succeeds, its success is inextricably linked to the success of those we serve?
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