CLIENTS
We have worked with a variety of clients and funding agencies, including private and not-for-profit technical assistance agencies, bilateral donors, development banks, UN agencies, foundations and corporates.
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
Sebanti Ghosh
Country Director, Alive & Thrive
September 1 2020
Anna Schurmann and Tattva Foundation worked with Alive & Thrive to develop a data use training module to strengthen implementation of Poshan Abhiyan, the National Nutrition Mission. The team liaised closely with officials at the state, district, block and facility levels to understand decision making practices and data needs in three districts in Uttar Pradesh, and developed a training module accordingly. They piloted the module successfully in Kannauj district and also reviewed it with state officials in Karnataka to understand how it could be scaled up nationally. The module was reviewed and appreciated by a national level expert technical advisory board. Anna and the team worked hard to produce a relevant and quality training module to suit the requirements of a complex systems environment. We appreciated both their hard work and the quality of the outputs. We wish all the very best for future endeavors!
Sandra Butler
Senior Manager, Business Strategy, CAMTECH
June 3 2019
Anna has been a fantastic "player/coach" in CAMTech's innovation network, serving as both an entrepreneur/innovator as well as mentor to other innovators. Anna was a part of a winning hackathon solution, has served as a mentor at one of CAMTech India's hackathons, and served as a national level judge at CAMTechX's Demo Day, where teams from across the country competed for the grand prize innovating to improve access to healthcare for the urban poor. Anna's ability to easily connect with people and work across disciplines, while thinking outside the box herself, makes her an asset to the growing global medical technology ecosystem.
Dr Ariyaratna Manathunge
Venerologist at Sri Lankan National STD/AIDS Control Program
March 17, 2019
I had a brief opportunity to works with Anna who visited Sri Lanka for a training need assessment in my organization. She is a hard-working consultant and it was a pleasure to work with her.
Anna delivered a guest lecture in Sri Lanks for a continuing education workshop for Australian GPs on women's health. Her session topic was 'Reducing Maternal & Infant Deaths: Innovations in Maternal & Child Health from South Asia'. Anna demonstrated excellent communication skills and depth of knowledge. Her session was a good balance of information and group discussion. The workshop evaluation refelcted, Anna's lecture was a program highlight. The richness her session provided, made the group ask that future workshops include a public health component.
Ulrike Hoekstra
Conseil Sante
April 11, 2018
As a technical advisor of Conseil Santé, the French implementing partner of the ADB financed Urban Health Project in India I had the pleasure to work with Anna in 2016/17.
Anna’s role as the capacity building expert evolved in terms of: ensuring the efficient insertion of the team in the urban networking (participation, presentation, facilitation of UH state and national workshops; facilitating and structuring the process of the UH training programmes in the different states, and supporting the UH think tank at the central level in finalising different training modules
During our collaboration, Anna has always given high-quality technical input. She succeeded to bridge the different communication habits of the multicultural team. Moreover, her knowledge of local and national institutions, NGOs, thematic mainstreams and socio-political constraints fruitfully contributed to the project implementation.
Missing Anna’s open style of dialoguing, flexibility and idealistic investment, wishing the very best for her future.
Elin Murless
Programme Quality Advisor, Catholic Relief Services India
April 11, 2018
Anna documented CRS’s ReMiND project in 2016. We enjoyed working with Anna, and the process she followed has been adopted by other CRS teams in their documentation efforts. Most importantly, the products she created were of a high standard and helped us in sharing the successes of the ReMiND project to various audiences nationally and globally. What I enjoyed most about working with Anna was her creative approach to team work, and her ability to consolidate vast and varied material for diverse groups of people.
Kathleen Poer
Systems for Better Health, USAID/ ABT Associates
March 4, 2018
Anna Schurman came to Zambia in 2017 to help the Ministry of Health team from the Human Resources and the Information and Communication Technology Departments develop the instructional guide for their new Human Resources Information System (iHRIS.) She quickly gained the team's acceptance and worked very collaboratively with the MOH colleagues to develop a very practical trainer's manual and training plan for the iHRIS. I was impressed by her speed, productivity, creativity, and ability to engage the MOH colleagues. Anna continues to stay in touch with the MOH colleagues to help them adjust the materials. I recommend Anna for her professionalism, productivity, and excellent people skills as well as great follow-through.
Aastha Sharma
Senior Consultant, National Health Systems Resource Centre, GoI
March 4, 2018
Meenakshi Jain
Country Director, India, IntraHealth International
December 2 2018
Anna worked with the IntraHealth International India office to help us document our experience in digital health and also support us to develop concepts for new projects. Her products were prime-time ready. This was a result of her becoming an integral part of the team to understand their expectations, experiences, and ideas. Anna is patient and receptive to ideas and feedback, goes out of her way to ensure that she gets all required details from the team even if it means multiple phones calls to the field team. She engages the team in a constructive debate to bring out the best in them. She always keeps her time commitments and will never let you down.
She ideates with you freely and brings her vast experience in public health to the conversation to develop content and design to suit the audience needs. She has the best interest of the people that we wish to serve at heart.
If don’t have the time or the funds to hire a staff person and yet need a person on the team go for her. She will represent you well, serve your interest, make connections to further your work and best of all bring the wealth of experience that you possibly can’t imagine a single staff member to have. It is a pleasure to work with her and look forward to working with her in future.
Ratan Jalan
Founder & Principal Consultant, Medium Consultancy
May 3 2019
I have known Anna as one of the leading public health professionals in the country. Recently, we engaged her to help us in the transformational journey of our healthcare consulting firm, with particular focus on the people piece: elements such as capacity building and workplace culture and environment. Based on the time she spent interacting with each and every team member, she came with some amazing insights and perspectives: underlying motives behind performance, issues such as gender diversity, cultural transformation and how could we fulfill their dreams. No wonder, she is now an integral part of our journey.
Vijayalakshmi Arora
Head of Programmes, Catholic Relief Services
September 24 2019
CRS was extremely fortunate to have you as the co- facilitator of the M-Health Strategy development in the context of our ongoing M Health work with the Government of Uttar Pradesh. CRS deeply appreciates your professionalism and contributions to the strategy development process. Your ability to think critically and your willingness to be flexible to adapt your facilitation to ensure both effective participation and critical reflection from the participants at the strategy development workshop was immensely appreciated. The thoroughness of your work was reflected in the quality of the scoping work that you had undertaken for us in the context of the strategy development. Thank you once again for your valuable contribution.
I worked with Anna during the implementation of National Urban Health Mission, specifically on developing training modules for capacity building of various cadres of NUHM program and clinical staff. I found Anna very proactive and an eager team player who always delivered technically sound, high quality work. She brought new insights, clarity and freshness into the products we developed. Her deliverables were always on time, and she went out of her way to ensure outputs were in line with objectives. With her vast experience, she is always an asset to any team she is part of!
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
Sebanti Ghosh
Country Director, Alive & Thrive
September 1 2020
Anna Schurmann and Tattva Foundation worked with Alive & Thrive to develop a data use training module to strengthen implementation of Poshan Abhiyan, the National Nutrition Mission. The team liaised closely with officials at the state, district, block and facility levels to understand decision making practices and data needs in three districts in Uttar Pradesh, and developed a training module accordingly. They piloted the module successfully in Kannauj district and also reviewed it with state officials in Karnataka to understand how it could be scaled up nationally. The module was reviewed and appreciated by a national level expert technical advisory board. Anna and the team worked hard to produce a relevant and quality training module to suit the requirements of a complex systems environment. We appreciated both their hard work and the quality of the outputs. We wish all the very best for future endeavors!
CRS was extremely fortunate to have you as the co- facilitator of the M-Health Strategy development in the context of our ongoing M Health work with the Government of Uttar Pradesh. CRS deeply appreciates your professionalism and contributions to the strategy development process. Your ability to think critically and your willingness to be flexible to adapt your facilitation to ensure both effective participation and critical reflection from the participants at the strategy development workshop was immensely appreciated. The thoroughness of your work was reflected in the quality of the scoping work that you had undertaken for us in the context of the strategy development. Thank you once again for your valuable contribution.
Anna has been a fantastic "player/coach" in CAMTech's innovation network, serving as both an entrepreneur/innovator as well as mentor to other innovators. Anna was a part of a winning hackathon solution, has served as a mentor at one of CAMTech India's hackathons, and served as a national level judge at CAMTechX's Demo Day, where teams from across the country competed for the grand prize innovating to improve access to healthcare for the urban poor. Anna's ability to easily connect with people and work across disciplines, while thinking outside the box herself, makes her an asset to the growing global medical technology ecosystem.
I have known Anna as one of the leading public health professionals in the country. Recently, we engaged her to help us in the transformational journey of our healthcare consulting firm, with particular focus on the people piece: elements such as capacity building and workplace culture and environment. Based on the time she spent interacting with each and every team member, she came with some amazing insights and perspectives: underlying motives behind performance, issues such as gender diversity, cultural transformation and how could we fulfill their dreams. No wonder, she is now an integral part of our journey.
Dr Ariyaratna Manathunge
Venerologist at Sri Lankan National STD/AIDS Control Program
March 17, 2019
I had a brief opportunity to works with Anna who visited Sri Lanka for a training need assessment in my organization. She is a hard-working consultant and it was a pleasure to work with her.
Anna delivered a guest lecture in Sri Lanks for a continuing education workshop for Australian GPs on women's health. Her session topic was 'Reducing Maternal & Infant Deaths: Innovations in Maternal & Child Health from South Asia'. Anna demonstrated excellent communication skills and depth of knowledge. Her session was a good balance of information and group discussion. The workshop evaluation refelcted, Anna's lecture was a program highlight. The richness her session provided, made the group ask that future workshops include a public health component.
Anna worked with the IntraHealth International India office to help us document our experience in digital health and also support us to develop concepts for new projects. Her products were prime-time ready. This was a result of her becoming an integral part of the team to understand their expectations, experiences, and ideas. Anna is patient and receptive to ideas and feedback, goes out of her way to ensure that she gets all required details from the team even if it means multiple phones calls to the field team. She engages the team in a constructive debate to bring out the best in them. She always keeps her time commitments and will never let you down.
She ideates with you freely and brings her vast experience in public health to the conversation to develop content and design to suit the audience needs. She has the best interest of the people that we wish to serve at heart.
If don’t have the time or the funds to hire a staff person and yet need a person on the team go for her. She will represent you well, serve your interest, make connections to further your work and best of all bring the wealth of experience that you possibly can’t imagine a single staff member to have. It is a pleasure to work with her and look forward to working with her in future.
As a technical advisor of Conseil Santé, the French implementing partner of the ADB financed Urban Health Project in India I had the pleasure to work with Anna in 2016/17.
Anna’s role as the capacity building expert evolved in terms of: ensuring the efficient insertion of the team in the urban networking (participation, presentation, facilitation of UH state and national workshops; facilitating and structuring the process of the UH training programmes in the different states, and supporting the UH think tank at the central level in finalising different training modules
During our collaboration, Anna has always given high-quality technical input. She succeeded to bridge the different communication habits of the multicultural team. Moreover, her knowledge of local and national institutions, NGOs, thematic mainstreams and socio-political constraints fruitfully contributed to the project implementation.
Missing Anna’s open style of dialoguing, flexibility and idealistic investment, wishing the very best for her future.
Anna Schurman came to Zambia in 2017 to help the Ministry of Health team from the Human Resources and the Information and Communication Technology Departments develop the instructional guide for their new Human Resources Information System (iHRIS.) She quickly gained the team's acceptance and worked very collaboratively with the MOH colleagues to develop a very practical trainer's manual and training plan for the iHRIS. I was impressed by her speed, productivity, creativity, and ability to engage the MOH colleagues. Anna continues to stay in touch with the MOH colleagues to help them adjust the materials. I recommend Anna for her professionalism, productivity, and excellent people skills as well as great follow-through.
Anna documented CRS’s ReMiND project in 2016. We enjoyed working with Anna, and the process she followed has been adopted by other CRS teams in their documentation efforts. Most importantly, the products she created were of a high standard and helped us in sharing the successes of the ReMiND project to various audiences nationally and globally. What I enjoyed most about working with Anna was her creative approach to team work, and her ability to consolidate vast and varied material for diverse groups of people.
I worked with Anna during the implementation of National Urban Health Mission, specifically on developing training modules for capacity building of various cadres of NUHM program and clinical staff. I found Anna very proactive and an eager team player who always delivered technically sound, high quality work. She brought new insights, clarity and freshness into the products we developed. Her deliverables were always on time, and she went out of her way to ensure outputs were in line with objectives. With her vast experience, she is always an asset to any team she is part of!
Anna Schurmann has been supporting Eco Femme in its research journey over the last 2 years since 2015 when we commissioned her to help us design tools for impact assessment for our adolescent girl menstrual health education program. Working with Anna has been absolutely fantastic! She has brought tremendous field based experience as a public health research consultant, helping us work through many challenges as we have been experimenting to find assessment tools that are a good fit for adolescent girls who have basic literacy skills around a sensitive topic. Anna has generously made herself available to discuss our questions and has accompanied us on our journey of trial and error bringing crucial inputs at critical moments. She has been patient and non imposing always trying to understand our needs and thinks along with us adapting the research design elements to the nuances of our situation and field based challenges. She is thoroughly professional yet warm and easy to relate to. We feel very lucky to have found such a perfect fit for our women and girl centric project!
Nisha Jain
IEC Manager, ICDS Programme, Madhya Pradesh, India
February 9, 2016
Ms. Anna Schurmann has developed an Innovation toolkit titled “Nav Aayaam” for ICDS, GoMP under the ICDS Mission. We were very happy with Anna's professional and friendly approach, and the final product. The toolkit in the form of a Manual is designed as per the programmatic requirement of the ICDS Mission and in consultation with department officials, the Core Group for Innovation and various NGOs as well. The toolkit draws from Anna’s study and observations of key Innovations within the ICDS. Designed as a reference manual, the toolkit can be applied at different levels from the State to the Anganwadi Centres. It also incorporates components of Intervention Design, Intervention Planning, Stakeholder Engagement, Monitoring and Evaluation."
Anna engaged with the Gates Foundation on an engagement to assess the eHealth & mHealth landscape in India. As I was relatively new to the area, I found Anna offered a lot of insights about the subject and built great rapport with various stakeholders as part of the study. Anna is a very passionate and committed consultant and excellent at networking. She brings tons of positive energy to conversations and truly adds value to project outcomes. I wish her all the best and look forward to re-engaging her in future.
Anna was hired as a short-term consultant for Digital Green to develop a strategy document. She went above and beyond her assigned scope of work to understand concepts, capture perspectives from internal and external stakeholders, and conduct her own literature research to ensure that the strategy that she helped develop was robust and would have the ownership of all those that would need to drive it forward. By working effectively and efficiently with our team, Anna displayed the key qualities we look for in a consultant. We would highly recommend her for other consulting projects and hope to leverage her skills in the future.
Anna has a deep commitment to advancing public health in disadvantaged communities and among vulnerable populations. I’ve been impressed by her collaborative style, her depth of understanding of the public health community and challenges facing India.
We have worked together for India TB Project. During my tenure, I found her to be dedicated, hard working and provided exemplary technical support in the development of facilitator guide on training module. Anna is a versatile writer and has produced excellent documents. She has in-depth knowledge of various public health domains. She is a team player and has ability to work in multi-disciplinary team and settings.
I hired Anna to co-develop operations research protocols for a cervical cancer project in four sub-Saharan African countries. Despite the fact that this subject matter was not yet in Anna’s skill set, she was a very fast learner and was able to absorb all the relevant background information, effectively communicate her thoughts, and produce relevant and comprehensive outputs. She put her strong study design and research ethics knowledge to good use and both protocols that she developed were high-quality, and have withstood several rounds of expert review.
Finally, and importantly, I was also impressed by Anna’s ability to manage multiple stakeholders (in the UK, US, and East Africa, with both technical and non-technical backgrounds) and produce protocols and related documents that fully reflected everyone’s input. I was very pleased with Anna’s work, and hope to work with her again in the future.
Initiatives Inc. hired Anna to develop a facilitator’s guide to accompany an audio visual training for the Revised National TB Control Program. Anna quickly worked with us to determine the requirements of the guide. She asked pertinent questions and helped us think through the product more carefully. She developed a beautiful structure for the guide and populated it with substantive content. In this assignment, Anna showed strong professional ability to understand and respond to the needs of multiple clients. Her technical expertise enabled her to ask relevant questions and raise critical issues that stakeholders needed to consider not just for the development of the guide, but for the training as a whole. The end product was of excellent professional quality. I highly recommend Anna to any organization and hope Initiatives Inc. will have opportunities to work with her in the future.
We engaged Anna to do a comprehensive situation analysis of opportunities in reproductive health in India. She undertook the rush assignment with enthusiasm, insight and the perseverance to go through large, often conflicting data sets. The end result was a clearly organized presentation that was both comprehensive and convincing. We were able to derive clear strategic directions from Anna’s work and expect to request further work from her. I would recommend Anna to any organization that requires someone with that unique combination of public health perspective, a true gift for evaluating the significance of data and the ability to synthesize and make sense of multiple data sources.
Anna is a detailed oriented person with sound conceptual understanding and strong monitoring and evaluation skills. I had an opportunity to work with her in the Sukeshma project where she is leading the knowledge management and scale up of innovations work in the project. She demonstrated her knowledge management expertise by creating a concise, focused and easy to understand strategy document for the project. During the later phase of the project, she led the efforts to develop common understanding among the team members about the knowledge management and scale up work. She played an instrumental role in developing implementation and monitoring blueprint (that included process docuementation) for the scale up work of the project. Anna has excellent analytical and writing skills. She is supporting the Vistaar Project of IntraHealth in its data analysis and documentation efforts. She is both a leader and a team player who is always willing to learn and contribute to the growth of the team and the organisation.
Ms Anna has an excellent documentation skills. She has been very generous with her time and her knowledge and has been by far the best documentation specialist for our organization and our project. You give her the task and before your eyes blink she will accomplish that. A good team player, clarity in her thoughts and a complete go-getter. Another thing which makes her stand out is her ability to connect with people.
I had an oppurtunity to work with Anna on the editorial team for Arogyavani editions (an regular e-Bulletin of KSHSRC). Anna is a highly organized, goal oriented, independent and hard working perfectionist. I am also impressed with the speed of her output. It’s been a real pleasure working together with her. She is innovative, extremely enthusiastic about her work which is infectious and also a encouraging team member…all my best wishes…