In 2025, Sentient focused on strengthening the investigative ecosystem for animals in India and across Asia, while continuing to support investigations globally. Alongside direct investigative support, we invested in research, training, equipment access, and convenings to better understand why evidence so often fails to translate into sustained advocacy, legal action, and reform.
This post provides a high-level overview of our 2025 work and outlines how key learnings from the year shaped our priorities for 2026–2030.
Over the past year, Sentient worked across four core areas: investigations, infrastructure and technical support, training and convening, and research and strategy development.
This work became a central input into Sentient’s updated long-term strategy and theory of change for India-focused work.
Due to safety and legal risks, not all investigations supported in 2025 are public.
A significant share of Sentient’s work in 2025 focused on reducing practical and operational barriers faced by investigators.
This support aimed to reduce personal risk, improve evidence quality, and enable investigators to operate more safely and effectively.
In 2025, Sentient invested heavily in training and convening investigators and advocates across regions.
Across all training formats, participants consistently highlighted the value of practical case studies, regionally relevant examples, and peer connection.
Across research, investigations, training, and convenings, a consistent pattern emerged.
The core constraint facing investigations in India and across Asia is not a lack of cruelty, evidence, or motivation, but the absence of a functioning system that allows evidence to reliably lead to media coverage, legal action, and advocacy outcomes.
Common challenges observed included:
These observations led us to rethink our role. Rather than focusing primarily on increasing the number of investigations conducted, we identified greater leverage in strengthening the infrastructure around investigations.
Learning from 2025 directly informed Sentient’s 2026–2030 strategy and theory of change for India-focused work.
From 2026–2030, Sentient will focus on repairing the evidence-to-impact pipeline by investing in:
We see our role as an anchor organisation: supporting investigators and partner organisations without replacing them, and helping build shared infrastructure that the wider movement can rely on.
→ Full 2026–2030 strategy here
In 2026, our focus will be on:
We expect this work to remain complex and uncertain. However, we believe that treating investigations as movement infrastructure, rather than isolated outputs, offers a stronger chance of durable, compounding impact.
In 2025, Sentient operated with a budget of approximately $140K, supported by a combination of institutional grants and individual donors. This funding enabled the research, investigative support, training, and convening work described above.
Looking ahead to 2026, Sentient plans to operate with a budget of approximately $207K. Based on current commitments, we anticipate a funding gap of approximately $185K. Additional funding would primarily support investigator training and wellbeing, shared equipment access, and coordination infrastructure across India and Asia.
More details on our funding and plans are available here.
We are deeply grateful to the investigators, activists, partner organisations, and supporters who made this work possible in 2025. We welcome feedback and discussion from the EA community.
Thank you for all of this essential work! I’m curious how you’re thinking about the role that advances in AI could play in repairing the evidence to impact pipeline: do you find that a significant amount of time is currently spent on manual tasks like evidence review and analysis aligned with identifying legal violations, transcription, creating exposé videos, or similar work?
Thank you for the question. This is something we are actively exploring, but cautiously. My response reflects limited direct exposure to investigations and is largely informed by the Indian context.
Yes, a significant amount of time is spent on manual work such as reviewing large volumes of footage, identifying legally relevant moments, transcription, translation, redaction, and assembling evidence for lawyers, media, or campaigns. These are all areas where AI could plausibly reduce friction in the evidence-to-impact pipeline.
That said, a few constraints shape our thinking:
Where we see near-term promise is in assistive and investigator-controlled tools (e.g. secure transcription, translation, basic indexing, and first-pass flagging) that reduce cognitive load without replacing judgment.
Longer term, AI may help standardise evidence preparation so investigations are more consistently advocacy- and litigation-ready. For now, our priority is ensuring the surrounding infrastructure is strong enough that any future technical gains actually translate into impact.
We expect our thinking here to evolve as both the tools and the investigative ecosystem mature.