Dear ME Consult team,

You have all our appreciation for a great 2020! No crisis, no fallback, no struggling! Wow!  All of a sudden MEI became a pure office-sitting company. We reached Grenada without being there; we managed fieldwork in Nigeria without running around, we researched Indonesia without touching one local doorknob … how was all that possible? Through an external crisis that hit the whole world the hard way … and we were able to handle its consequences.

I feel very sorry for all the people that have died, sorry for the grief it caused their loved ones, the suffering, the cancelled life plans, the unfulfilled travel plans, for not being able to spend the winter holidays at home, to have family meetings, to have a social life. It does not seem to be in our power to change this. But within MEI, we had to find a way to deal with the crisis, using our powers to proceed with our duties in all the countries we are committed to.

And due to your effort and resilience, it is working. 2020 is the year where we had almost no flights, no travelling, no car rides, cutting down our CO2 emissions drastically. But despite not being locally present, you still managed to master the projects. Kudos to all of you!

After 2018 and 2019, with internal struggles and re-structuring issues, 2020 brought us the validation that nothing was in vain, and that we are resilient to the future. Thanks to Raluca, who has proven to be a great change manager and change-maker! Thanks to the team that had to operationalize all the changes in the projects and even turned them into success for ME Consult. Thanks to each of you for your mindfulness, change of perspective and empathy. We are proud that you are all part of the MEI family and believe in decarbonization, decentralization, deregulation, democratization, and digitization in the Global South.

2021 is going to be the year in which we will prove how mature we are, that we can do even more, that our approach can flourish and that we will find new colleagues to expand our outreach, to support our work, to improve our achievements and to motivate us in reaching out to even more people, more microfinance institutions, more providers, more countries. Interconnecting all our achievements must be the path, just like interconnecting the solar home systems on the rooftops in the swarm electrification approach. Let us find and link the right partners, the right technologies, the right projects.
 

Let’s swarm together!

Yours, Noara & Daniel