Nice to know the word of day calendar is paying off.
I think donors should use reasonable indicators to judge evidence if an RCT isn’t available, while also being clear with themselves that this makes the grant higher risk. This is relatively easy in global health, where most places are doing decent monitoring, evaluation and learning, and running pre/post studies or difference-in-difference studies of their work. It’s harder in other cause areas, as I just posted about.
If donors have the money, I would love to see more funding specifically for RCTs. I think a funder or group of funders dedicated to this could do an enormous amount of good. You do need a significant amount of capital, though—it’s not uncommon for health RCTs to run to several million dollars per study.
Of course, my mid-stage global health fund aims to do good grantmaking in this gap, but we would need more capital to be the main funder of RCTs.
Nice to know the word of day calendar is paying off.
I think donors should use reasonable indicators to judge evidence if an RCT isn’t available, while also being clear with themselves that this makes the grant higher risk. This is relatively easy in global health, where most places are doing decent monitoring, evaluation and learning, and running pre/post studies or difference-in-difference studies of their work. It’s harder in other cause areas, as I just posted about.
If donors have the money, I would love to see more funding specifically for RCTs. I think a funder or group of funders dedicated to this could do an enormous amount of good. You do need a significant amount of capital, though—it’s not uncommon for health RCTs to run to several million dollars per study.
Of course, my mid-stage global health fund aims to do good grantmaking in this gap, but we would need more capital to be the main funder of RCTs.