No Lean Season, a program of nonprofit organization Evidence Action, today announced major support from the Global Innovation Fund. The Global Innovation Fund (GIF) is a London-headquartered investor in social innovations that aim to improve the lives and opportunities of millions of people in the developing world.  The total investment from GIF for the next two years is $2,571,210. The funds will be used to support the rigorous testing and expansion of No Lean Season in Bangladesh and Indonesia.

Press Release: No Lean Season, a program of nonprofit organization Evidence Action that reduces seasonal poverty and hunger through small cash transfers for bus tickets, announces backing by Y Combinator and the launch of an ambitious drive to combat seasonal poverty.

Evidence Action’s Board today announced that Kanika Bahl will be its new CEO.
 

Evidence Action Beta is looking for ambitious researchers whose work or insights could benefit millions of people living in poverty, and who want to participate in seeing their research turned into viable, scaled up programs. 

Have you done work that has similar potential?  Read on! 

The first cohort of “No Lean Season” participants in northern Bangladesh are on their way. More than 4,500 rural workers are traveling temporarily to nearby areas with higher wages and greater labor opportunities to support their family during the lean season. A few thousand more are expected to join the ranks before the end of the lean season around mid-December in Rangpur, the target area for the initial roll-out of the program. Here is an update. 

We are thrilled to be on the GiveWell recommended charity list this year again for the work we do at the Deworm the World Initiative. It is a great honor. 

Evidence Action is pleased to support Kenya’s Ministry of Health and its Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD) Unit as it carries out mass treatment for lymphatic filariasis. Led by the government of Kenya, treatment is provided to  communities in all six of Kenya’s endemic counties, targeting over 2.3 million adults and children.

Evidence Action is pleased to announce the appointment of two new board members to its Board of Directors: Shikhar Ghosh, a profession of management practice at Harvard University and an experienced entrepreneur, and John Gianola, a retired partner at Ernst & Young.

Photo impressions from the preparation for the last National Deworming Day round in India. Community mobilization and promotion of the Deworming Day is important to increase coverage and get community and political buy-in for the largest, single-day community health program in the world.  

Evidence Action’s Chief Executive Officer, Jeffrey Brown, has announced that he has resigned from the organization, effective November 21, 2016, to pursue other opportunities. Kanika Bahl, Evidence Action’s Board Chair, will serve as acting CEO. Evidence Action will conduct a global search for a new CEO.

We are exploring the potential of  leveraging the Dispensers for Safe Water network of local water promoters to deliver nutritional messages to families. We believe that the existing network of trained and dedicated individuals can provide a cost-effective way to increase household knowledge about nutrition, and potentially reduce undernutrition and malnutrition among children. This is the story of a randomized controlled trial to evaluate this. 

Scale is all about execution. This means constantly evaluating and improving our programs. We collect data on our key performance indicators, in order to make data-driven and evidence-based decisions on what works and on what we need to change. We collect data in a variety of ways but have been pushing hard to increase real-time, tech-enabled monitoring of our performance, and quick, streamlined, and action-oriented analysis. Here is what we are doing, with a frank assessment on how it’s going. 

Check out our new dashboard with real-time key performance indicators for Dispensers for Safe Water, our flagship program in East Africa. See how we are doing - any time! 

The Government of India held National Deworming Day 2016 on February 10, deworming 179 million children in 1.8 million preschools and schools. Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative is the technical assistance provider to the Government of India, and is also working closely with seven state governments to implement National Deworming Day. 

To increase the number of children dewormed this year, we wanted to bring private schools into the fold of this government-led program that especially target poorer children. And we did: for the first time, 170,000 private schools dewormed their pupils across the country.

Students gather for deworming medical tablet distribution at Upper Primary School in Janaksinghpura in Rajasthan, India on February 10, 2016 during National Deworming Day. (Kuni Takahashi/AP Images for Evidence Action)

Earlier this year, India held the largest public health event conducted in one day: The country dewormed 179 million children in almost all states and Union territories, according to the government’s latest figure. Deworming took place in 810,000 government schools, 800,000 preschools (anganwadi centers) and, for the first time, in 170,000 private schools. School-based deworming leverages anganwadi workers and teachers to deliver safe, simple treatment for parasitic worms. 

Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative is the principal technical assistance provider to the Government of India’s National Deworming Day and our team was instrumental in making it happen. 

Today, Evidence Action welcomes the release of a new study that shows that mass deworming of children has a significant positive effect on child weight and is highly cost effective, with a weight gain per dollar 35 times greater than school feeding programs.

This study strongly refutes findings from a previous critique of mass deworming of children in developing countries with high levels of parasitic worms, a Cochrane meta analysis by Taylor-Robinson et al (2015.) that questioned the long-standing World Health Organization (WHO) policy supporting mass deworming.

The new research, “Does Mass Deworming Affect Child Nutrition?: Meta-analysis, Cost-Effectiveness, and Statistical Power” was authored by Kevin Croke, Joan Hamory Hicks, Eric Hsu, Michael Kremer, and Edward Miguel.

This week, the Cross River State Ministry of Health’s Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) unit launched its inaugural statewide school-based deworming exercise that will treat against two neglected tropical diseases that are particularly common in children: schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiasis (STH). The school-based deworming exercise will cover 11 of the 18 local government areas in Cross River for the first time, and is targeting 600,000 at-risk school-aged children in primary and junior secondary public and private schools.

Press Release: 

Evidence Action, a global development organization focused on scaling rigorously-evaluated programs, and RDRS Bangladesh, a leading development organization in northern Bangladesh, today announced a four-year partnership.  

The partnership will field-test and promote ‘No Lean Season,’ an innovative anti-poverty intervention aimed at reducing seasonal income insecurity in poor rural communities. No Lean Season will reach 310,000 low-income households in Northern Bangladesh in the next four years.

On April 28 and 29, more than 700,000 primary school children across four provinces in northern Vietnam will line up in their classrooms to receive a deworming tablet. 8.5 million children in Vietnam are at risk of parasitic worm infections that can harm their health, development, and school participation.

We are excited to announce that Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative supports the Government of  Vietnam as it strengthens and improves school-based deworming to keep children healthy and in school. Read more about out partnership there, and about what we are doing. 

Regular mass deworming of children once or twice a year has greatly contributed to the reductionin the prevalence of worms in several countries. National, school-based deworming programs are the most efficient and cost-effective way to reach kids, and are a cornerstone of addressing the public health threat of STH and schistosomiasis in a growing number of countries.

But there is a growing recognition that treatment of children alone might not be sufficient to break the transmission of worm infections. Infected adults constitute a latent reservoir of worm eggs and present a significant re-infection risk to children, in particular for hookworm, one of the three STH. So, how do we reduce the reinfection of children by treating adults? Enter Take Up, a new research project of Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative. 

Worldwide, lack of access to safe water is a problem that disproportionately affects the very poor. Dispensers for Safe Water takes a targeted, evidence-based approach to increasing access to safe water for the rural poor. Check out our new video to see what a “day in the life” is like for a Dispenser and how this innovative technology is providing 4.5 million people with access to safe water.

We are very proud and grateful for the recent grant of $10.8 million to our Deworm the World Initiative from Good Ventures. 

Good Ventures supported GiveWell’s “top charities” for the 2015 giving season, and we are honored to be part of this exemplary group of organizations.

Despite the availability of inexpensive and easy-to-use technologies and simple behaviors that can prevent diarrhea, it kills more than half a million children a year, predominantly in the developing world. More troubling still, social scientists have found it challenging to get high adoption rates and maintain participation amongst poor households, even when the technology is provided free. 

In a randomized controlled trial in Karachi, Pakistan, I test the hypothesis that perhaps families need tools that clearly demonstrate the impact of health interventions – in this case, chlorine tablets for water purification.

As we are are getting ready to support the Indian government with National Deworming Day in 2016, we are proud to announce that we have recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian state of Telangana.

As the world watched the COP21 negotiations in Paris, we were paying close attention to the discussions on the future of carbon markets. While not a perfect system, the generation of carbon credits is one of the hallmarks of Dispensers for Safe Water, allowing the program to become self-sustaining and your donation to go further.  

It takes a community of committed people to reach millions. Our Deworm the World staff and partners in Ethiopia and Kenya, through a pioneering international collaboration, are working together to ramp up a successful national school-based deworming program in Ethiopia.