Very briefly, the process was starting with GiveWell’s list of charities they might like to see (this was mostly broad cause areas) and doing further research into each area to determine a short list of promising specific charities.
1) I think my main thoughts around this is that the charity market is a lot less efficient than the for profit market so there are more low hanging opportunities. And even the for profit market isn’t perfect. There’s a specific brand of vegan sausages in the UK that is impossible to get in Canada, despite it being better than anything Canadian-made. Additionally, as we mentioned in our report, there are already charities doing this, it’s just it’s often easy to forget how large the world is. AMF and all the other enormous bed net charities still haven’t filled all the gaps for bednets because there are just so many people. Likewise with SMS. On top of that, mobile health is a relatively new field due to the nature of the technology, so a lot of obvious things are still just starting to permeate the space.
2) This could be true. We do have an explicit category for logistical difficulty, so we certainly have considered that as an important factor. That being said, I think even if we held logistical difficulty consistent across interventions, our team would still favour SMS based on the other criteria.
3) I can see this being tempting, but we do not think of SMS as something that we simply program and wait for the DALYs to roll in. We suspect there will be constant work for further expansion, tweaking of messaging and code, and testing to see what could improve the system.
Very briefly, the process was starting with GiveWell’s list of charities they might like to see (this was mostly broad cause areas) and doing further research into each area to determine a short list of promising specific charities.
1) I think my main thoughts around this is that the charity market is a lot less efficient than the for profit market so there are more low hanging opportunities. And even the for profit market isn’t perfect. There’s a specific brand of vegan sausages in the UK that is impossible to get in Canada, despite it being better than anything Canadian-made. Additionally, as we mentioned in our report, there are already charities doing this, it’s just it’s often easy to forget how large the world is. AMF and all the other enormous bed net charities still haven’t filled all the gaps for bednets because there are just so many people. Likewise with SMS. On top of that, mobile health is a relatively new field due to the nature of the technology, so a lot of obvious things are still just starting to permeate the space.
2) This could be true. We do have an explicit category for logistical difficulty, so we certainly have considered that as an important factor. That being said, I think even if we held logistical difficulty consistent across interventions, our team would still favour SMS based on the other criteria.
3) I can see this being tempting, but we do not think of SMS as something that we simply program and wait for the DALYs to roll in. We suspect there will be constant work for further expansion, tweaking of messaging and code, and testing to see what could improve the system.
Chobani was one of the world’s fastest growing companies for a while, based mainly just on bringing Turkish yogurt-making practices to the US.