My 2 cents, from decent quality second hand information, yes! Tamaika is a legitimate charity that is doing fantastic work treating malnutrition cost-effectively.
I’ll also piggyback off this great question and @JustinGraham’s fantastic response below and point out there are many smaller orgs that have performed their own cost-effectiveness analysis (Introducing Lafiya Nigeria, Tamaika etc.) and judge ourselves to be cost-effective compared to top GiveWell orgs—without having the direct RCTs on the exact work we do to be able to qualify for GiveWell’s top charity list, nor necessarily having external bodies assess us. (Rethink did an analysis for Lafiya). I would think almost all CE charities will have an analysis along these lines performed in the first few years of operation, and some that weren’t judged to be cost-effective might be shut down.
Unfortunately like @JustinGraham says, doing direct RCTs on the life-saving evfect of our work might be close-to-impossible now either for ethical reasons, or because the size of study needed these days to detect mortalty differences is very large, so studies powered for mortality have become rare. This is largely because far less kids die than in the past - which is great. This doesn’t mean though that we can’t do high quality research on proxy measures though (for us at OneDay Health quality of care and healthcare access) which we are currently doing in collaboration with top universities.
I’m co-founder of OneDay Health and we’ve done a cost-effectiveness analysis which might put us between $800 and $1800 per life saved. Early stage analysis (and self performed) analysiss though often grossly overestimates cost-effectiveness, so this cost-effectiveness would likely be hugely reduced if others or GiveWell did their own analysis.
My 2 cents, from decent quality second hand information, yes! Tamaika is a legitimate charity that is doing fantastic work treating malnutrition cost-effectively.
I’ll also piggyback off this great question and @JustinGraham’s fantastic response below and point out there are many smaller orgs that have performed their own cost-effectiveness analysis (Introducing Lafiya Nigeria, Tamaika etc.) and judge ourselves to be cost-effective compared to top GiveWell orgs—without having the direct RCTs on the exact work we do to be able to qualify for GiveWell’s top charity list, nor necessarily having external bodies assess us. (Rethink did an analysis for Lafiya). I would think almost all CE charities will have an analysis along these lines performed in the first few years of operation, and some that weren’t judged to be cost-effective might be shut down.
Unfortunately like @JustinGraham says, doing direct RCTs on the life-saving evfect of our work might be close-to-impossible now either for ethical reasons, or because the size of study needed these days to detect mortalty differences is very large, so studies powered for mortality have become rare. This is largely because far less kids die than in the past - which is great. This doesn’t mean though that we can’t do high quality research on proxy measures though (for us at OneDay Health quality of care and healthcare access) which we are currently doing in collaboration with top universities.
I’m co-founder of OneDay Health and we’ve done a cost-effectiveness analysis which might put us between $800 and $1800 per life saved. Early stage analysis (and self performed) analysiss though often grossly overestimates cost-effectiveness, so this cost-effectiveness would likely be hugely reduced if others or GiveWell did their own analysis.