GW’s email newsletter just alerted me to their grant writeup on this, in case you still want to look into it / aren’t subbed to them :) especially the main reservations section
Thanks yes. I don’t think there’s much new in the write-up that hasn’t been discussed—
The BOTEC is clear and well written as usual. I think (predictably) that they are very optimistic about what TSUs might be able do. They think that TSUs will...
1) Have a 70% chance of increasing cost effectiveness of 20 −40 million dollars of health spending in each country (over 100million in total) by around 20%. This through shifting allocation. I struggle to fathom how that could be possible here in Uganda, with my albeit limited knowledge of how the ministry of health works here. If they could move 20 million of funding to be 30% more cost-effective in even one country I’d be impressed.
2) Bring in 40 million dollars of counterfactually new health funding in the countries that they work in (between 2 and 20 million in each country). This would be a truly brilliant lobbying effort that again I’m very skeptical about. Bringing in new counterfactual funding is very difficult.
if a technical support unit can achieve anything like that in only 18 months I would be blown away. The tricky thing thing is that it will be very difficult to tell whether this happened or not—again it would be great to have an external org (or GiveWell themselves) assessing the likely counterfactual here.
On the other hand (to their credit as it hurts their BOTEC) they are very conservative about the chance of the grant being funded by some other funder. They put this chance at 50%, but I think its far far lower. Very few orgs in the world fund this kind of work to the tune of 4.5 million dollars, I would have put it at more like 20%-30%
Actually now that you mention the shifting health budget allocation I’m also skeptical, although I’m mostly thinking of CEAP’s experience finding the development budget ~fixed and the remaining sliver fought over by hundreds of NGOs, I take you to be saying it’s the same story for health budget.
I agree re: impact attribution determination and they don’t seem to be planning to do that in their plans for follow-up section.
GW’s email newsletter just alerted me to their grant writeup on this, in case you still want to look into it / aren’t subbed to them :) especially the main reservations section
Thanks yes. I don’t think there’s much new in the write-up that hasn’t been discussed—
The BOTEC is clear and well written as usual. I think (predictably) that they are very optimistic about what TSUs might be able do. They think that TSUs will...
1) Have a 70% chance of increasing cost effectiveness of 20 −40 million dollars of health spending in each country (over 100million in total) by around 20%. This through shifting allocation. I struggle to fathom how that could be possible here in Uganda, with my albeit limited knowledge of how the ministry of health works here. If they could move 20 million of funding to be 30% more cost-effective in even one country I’d be impressed.
2) Bring in 40 million dollars of counterfactually new health funding in the countries that they work in (between 2 and 20 million in each country). This would be a truly brilliant lobbying effort that again I’m very skeptical about. Bringing in new counterfactual funding is very difficult.
if a technical support unit can achieve anything like that in only 18 months I would be blown away. The tricky thing thing is that it will be very difficult to tell whether this happened or not—again it would be great to have an external org (or GiveWell themselves) assessing the likely counterfactual here.
On the other hand (to their credit as it hurts their BOTEC) they are very conservative about the chance of the grant being funded by some other funder. They put this chance at 50%, but I think its far far lower. Very few orgs in the world fund this kind of work to the tune of 4.5 million dollars, I would have put it at more like 20%-30%
Actually now that you mention the shifting health budget allocation I’m also skeptical, although I’m mostly thinking of CEAP’s experience finding the development budget ~fixed and the remaining sliver fought over by hundreds of NGOs, I take you to be saying it’s the same story for health budget.
I agree re: impact attribution determination and they don’t seem to be planning to do that in their plans for follow-up section.