At Evidence Action we are actively managing the unprecedented set of risks and challenges posed by COVID-19 to the communities and people we serve. In such circumstances, provision of basic services becomes even more essential, to avert easily preventable disease and avoid further burdening fragile health systems.
When we launched Dispensers for Safe Water, we had a bold vision: deliver safe water access through a self-sufficient program. While we’re still a long way from a self-funded program, last year, the UNFCCC approved our largest consignment of carbon credits to date. Carbon funds provide an important leverage opportunity for the program’s donor funding – and contribute to our ability to provide safe water to over 4 million people.
The last year was tremendous, not just for us, but for the entire field of evidence-based, international development. Take a look at our top highlights from 2019, as well as some of the tough decisions we had to make along the way.
Evidence Action has prepared a comprehensive program toolkit, in order to guide potential technical and public partners in providing technical assistance to programs similar to G-United. We encourage other governments, technical partners and organizations to use the materials, tools, processes and strategies described here.
This has been a tremendous year not just for us, but for the field of evidence-based international development as a whole. As we wrap up a year full of impact, here are some important milestones from our work this year.
For seven consecutive years, Evidence Action has supported the Kenyan government’s National School-Based Deworming program. Based on our support to this successful program, in 2016 the government sought similar assistance with another program focused on a different NTD: lymphatic filariasis.
Meet Jeff Grosz, the new Senior Director of Accelerator and the newest member of the Global Leadership Team. Jeff will play a key role in executing Evidence Action’s new 5 year strategy, as he and his team work to develop new programs that can match the impact of our flagships.
Evidence Action has decided to wind-down and hibernate our Winning Start program, designed to connect youth volunteers to primary schools, where they conducted foundational literacy and numeracy sessions. Challenges with government resourcing, coupled with Evidence Action’s strategic shift towards ready-to-scale and primarily health delivery-focused interventions, led to this decision.
Evidence Action heartily congratulates Michael Kremer, Esther Duflo, and Abhijit Banerjee on their recently awarded Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.Their recognition holds special significance for us as their work has a profound bearing on our own: Evidence Action was launched to scale up innovations backed by such rigorous evidence – ensuring that millions of people could benefit from proven solutions.
I’m excited to share Evidence Action’s strategy and plans for the next 5 years. By 2024 Evidence Action plans to double our impact, measurably improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people and leading the way in evidence-based, cost-effective international development.
Adoption rates are the most critical success metric for Dispensers for Safe Water and as an organization focused on continuous improvement, we are always looking for ways to sustain and improve these rates.
We’ve supported India’s National Deworming Day for the last ~4 years, but monitoring a program of such magnitude isn’t easy. Our data collection has had to evolve with scale in order to continually support cost-effectiveness and maximize efficiency.
The pursuit of delivering measurable benefits for hundreds of millions of people in poverty, demands we invest in our operations and our global team. We have recognized the need for a new role within the organization: Chief People Officer, and we are pleased to announce that we recently welcomed Ryan Noll in this role.
Evidence Action is terminating the No Lean Season program, which was designed to increase household food consumption and income by providing travel subsidies for seasonal migration by poor rural laborers in Bangladesh. In this blog post, we share the rationale behind this decision.
As part of our Winning Start initiative, Evidence Action’s Beta Incubator has spent the last five years working with the Government of Kenya to co-design
For several years, we’ve partnered with the Government of India to deliver mass school-based deworming as part of our Deworm the World Initiative. The ongoing success of this partnership has allowed us to explore opportunities to extend our impact in India. Ultimately, we settled on one promising area for further exploration through our Beta incubator: India’s national Weekly Iron and Folic Acid Supplementation (WIFS) program, which is designed to address the pressing challenge of anemia among school-age children.
The Government of Pakistan has initiated the “Deworm Islamabad Initiative,” targeting 570,000 children aged 5-15 in Islamabad who are at risk of infection with intestinal worms. Trained school teachers administered free-of-cost deworming medicine (mebendazole), which is universally recognized as a safe and cost-effective treatment.
Our Dispensers for Safe Water program operates at scale across Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi, providing safe water access to 4 million people today. In this post, we share a video highlighting how we’ve continued to iterate and adapt our dispensers to better meet user needs and maintain the low cost-per-person that makes this program a recognized standout in cost-effectiveness.
Winning Start, an education program in our Beta incubator, is designed to improve child literacy and numeracy by using youth volunteers to deliver the rigorously tested and proven “teaching at the right level” (TaRL) pedagogy. As the world celebrates International Volunteer Day, we celebrate Winning Start volunteers – who spend up to a year working to unlock the promise of an upcoming generation. We interviewed five youth who successfully completed the Government of Kenya’s G-United program to learn more about their experiences and motivations.
There is a difference between a low-cost program and a cost-effective program. Implementing a low-cost program is not sufficient – we want to ensure that the impacts of the program are measurable and that the benefits outweigh the costs – this is what makes a program truly cost-effective. Putting these two parts of the equation – costs and benefits – together, we can estimate the value for money of our program.
Evidence Action is excited to announce that GiveWell has recognized our two flagship programs this year: Deworm the World Initiative (top charity) and Dispensers for Safe Water (standout charity).
No Lean Season, a late-stage program in the Beta incubation portfolio, provides small loans to poor, rural households for seasonal labor migration. Based on multiple rounds of rigorous research showing positive effects on migration and household consumption and income, the program was delivered and tested at scale for the first time in 2017. Results showed that the 2017 program did not have the desired impact on inducing migration, and consequently did not increase income and consumption. In this post, we dive deep into these results and explain how they are shaping the path forward for No Lean Season.
In this post, I trace my journey from English student to Global Health Corps Fellow at Evidence Action. I reflect on the process of realizing my personal mission: to leverage the collective power of stories and data to dismantle health inequities and improve people’s lives.
Last month, our team attended the inaugural Teaching at the Right Level conference in South Africa, hosted by pioneers in the field, Pratham and J-PAL. On a panel with organizations piloting variations of youth or volunteer-led TaRL models across Africa, our Program Coordinator, Fred Abungu, shared what we’ve learned from working with the Government of Kenya to effectively and sustainably recruit, retain, and motivate volunteers to deliver remedial support at steadily increasing scale. In this post, we explore some of the insights he offered.
Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) disproportionately affect people living in poverty, some of whom may be difficult to reach through traditional mass drug administration (MDA). We have attended the NTD NGO Network (NNN) conference for the past several years to share lessons from our work, and learn from our colleagues and partners in the NTD space. In September of this year, members of our global deworming team again participated in the conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and convened a workshop titled Increasing inclusion of hard-to-reach groups using lessons and strategies from within and outside the NTD community.
In 2016, the Millennium Water Alliance (MWA) approached Evidence Action with an interest in piloting our safe water model in Ethiopia, where over 48 million people still lack access to safe water despite the monumental strides that have been made to tackle the issue there. For us, the partnership, with CARE International as MWA’s lead implementing partner, offered a chance to gauge whether another organization can implement the Dispensers for Safe Water model given our support in supplying the hardware, sharing implementation best practices, and supporting program monitoring.
As the United States commemorates Women’s Equality Day on August 26, we’re celebrating a key aspect of our diversity, which is not yet the norm across many sectors, including in international development – gender equality. In the spirit of challenging convention, one of our core values, we’re honoring the phenomenal women who lead across Evidence Action. We asked some of these women to answer a few questions about their professional development, inspiration, and the best career advice they’ve received, among other topics. Read the second part of this two-part interview series to hear more insights from our women leaders.
As the United States commemorates Women’s Equality Day on August 26, we’re celebrating a key aspect of our diversity, which is not yet the norm across many sectors, including in international development – gender equality. In the spirit of challenging convention, one of our core values, we’re honoring the phenomenal women who lead across Evidence Action. We asked some of these women to answer a few questions about their professional development, inspiration, and the best career advice they’ve received, among other topics. Read part one of this two-part interview series to see what they had to say!
India’s National Deworming Day (NDD), initiated in 2015, is the world’s largest single-day public health intervention, providing children between the ages of 1-19 with free deworming tablets. As part of Evidence Action’s technical assistance to the Government of India and select state governments for the August NDD treatment round, we are collaborating on several tailored strategies to target hard-to-reach children, including migrant workers in the north-eastern state of Tripura.
In the second of two blog posts for The Stone Family Foundation, Arjun Pant discusses the Dispenser for Safe Water program’s path toward financial sustainability.