Meta-level: Great comment- I think we should be starting more of a discussion around theoretical high-level mechanisms of why charities would be effective in the first place—I think there’s too much emphasis on evidence of ‘do they work’.
I think the main driver of the effectiveness of infectious disease prevention charities like AMF and deworming might be that they solve coordination/ public goods problems, because if everyone in a certain region uses a health intervention it is much more effective in driving down overall disease incidence. Because of the tragedy of the commons, people are less likely to buy bed nets themselves.
For micronutrient charities it is lack of information and education—most people don’t know about and don’t understand micronutrients.
Lack of information / markets
Flagging that that there were charities—DMI and Living Goods—which address these issues, and so, if these turn out to explain most of the variance in differences in cost-effectiveness you highlight then these need to be scaled up. I never quite understood why a DMI-like charity with ~zero marginal cost-per-user couldn’t be scaled up more until it’s much more cost-effective than all other charities.
Meta-level: Great comment- I think we should be starting more of a discussion around theoretical high-level mechanisms of why charities would be effective in the first place—I think there’s too much emphasis on evidence of ‘do they work’.
I think the main driver of the effectiveness of infectious disease prevention charities like AMF and deworming might be that they solve coordination/ public goods problems, because if everyone in a certain region uses a health intervention it is much more effective in driving down overall disease incidence. Because of the tragedy of the commons, people are less likely to buy bed nets themselves.
For micronutrient charities it is lack of information and education—most people don’t know about and don’t understand micronutrients.
Flagging that that there were charities—DMI and Living Goods—which address these issues, and so, if these turn out to explain most of the variance in differences in cost-effectiveness you highlight then these need to be scaled up. I never quite understood why a DMI-like charity with ~zero marginal cost-per-user couldn’t be scaled up more until it’s much more cost-effective than all other charities.