Over the last four years, we have worked with the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics to incorporate low-cost behavioral interventions into our Winning Start program to incentivize volunteer retention, motivation, and performance. Since introducing these insights, we’ve seen higher retention rates and engagement, leading to greater reach, and improved cost-effectiveness.

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.

In the first of two blog posts for The Stone Family Foundation, Dispensers for Safe Water Director Arjun Pant reflects on key lessons learned as the program rapidly scaled its operations.

In our Dispensers for Safe Water program, which provides access to safe drinking water by installing chlorine dispensers near community water sources in Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi, we verify their use by measuring the adoption rate of chlorine among the households that our dispensers serve. Through the survey conducted in late 2017, we found that our population reached declined from 4.7 million, which is based on surveys conducted for each new dispenser installation during program scale-up from 2012-2016, to 4.0 million people program-wide today.

A 2005 randomized controlled trial conducted in Kenya found that girls who were told about the dangers of sugar daddies were 28% less likely to be pregnant at year-end than girls who were simply told to abstain, and girls who received no sexual education beyond that offered in school. Based on this success, Young 1ove worked with a group of partners, including the Government of Botswana, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Botswana-Baylor Children’s Clinical Centre of Excellence, and Evidence Action, to evaluate the idea again through a similar program, No Sugar. This second round of evaluation delivered mixed results and all partners involved in the program made a decision not to scale the No Sugar intervention. Here are our three biggest takeaways from the experience.

What happens when you tell middle-school and teenage girls in Africa about the dangers of sexually engaging with older men who offer them financial favors? Does it affect their choice of sexual partner? A Kenya-based, 2005 randomized controlled trial suggested it might. In 2014, Botswana-based non-profit Young 1ove brought together a group of partners to re-evaluate the idea through a program, “No Sugar,” designed to be scaled-up across Southern Africa. The evaluation yielded mixed results; consequently, the Government of Botswana, Young 1ove, and other partners are not scaling up No Sugar as it was originally designed. Instead, Young 1ove is redesigning the program for further evaluation of impact, before potentially scaling it up in future.

At Evidence Action, we determine impact based on data, and in partnership with governments, we reached over 280 million children in 2017 alone through our Deworm the World Initiative. Our focus on scale means we rarely have the opportunity to zoom in on an individual’s experience. So in February, we jumped at the chance to visit these two girls, who we first met on a deworming day in Kenya back in 2013.

In late 2017, we had a fantastic opportunity to participate in a ‘Teaching at the Right Level’ (TaRL) workshop in India hosted by Indian education non-profit and pioneer of the TaRL model, Pratham. The crux of the workshop was our favorite theme here at Evidence Action: how to translate rigorous research into effective, scaled action.

2017 Deworm the World Initiatives Milestones: What We've Achieved This Year

Parasitic worm infections disproportionately affect people living in poverty, especially those who are difficult to reach with mass drug administration. Evidence Action is committed to supporting innovations that enable treatment for all children at risk of worm infections regardless of their circumstances.Here’s a look at some targeted strategies implemented in Kenya to improve coverage of hard-to-reach children over the past year.

This year, our Dispensers for Safe Water program once more provided access to safe water for nearly 5 million individuals across Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi. We estimate that this simple and low-cost innovation has prevented over 2.5 million cases of diarrhea in children and saved over 2,000 young lives to date.

In the last three years, Evidence Action Beta has grown and matured in significant ways.