Thanks for your post! As mentioned in other comments, one central factor to understand how cost-effective your procedure appears, could be the cost of having a medical professional as you are (or a person with the minimum required medical expertise and local context knowledge) spend their time roaming, (incentivizing people to meet them, this one was easy for you and probably always is), meeting people and identifying patients to support. Could you roughly estimate these costs per case if you were to do that as your main occupation?
The second part of it, paying for their treatment, seems like something that could be rather easy (much uncertainty here ofc) to do when embedded into the right framing. As pointed out by Jason and others in the comments, these are patients with very tangible, heart-warming stories and very obvious direct impact-connection to a donation, which makes them suitable for successful fundraising within the broader non-EA target-groups.
This is of course without evaluating the potentially quickly arising adverse effects such as the deterioration of informal institutions of local fundraising among families and friends due to them pointing potential patients to you etc..
I haven’t got this far in terms of estimating the costs of doing it at a bigger scale—after this trial I was probably a little less enthusiastic about the idea than before I started to be honest so I probably won’t go ahead and do that right now anyway.
I don’t think I’m a person with the minimum required medical knowledge at all though, it would be harder for others but doable.
The adverse effects you speak of is certainly a real risk but I don’t think one of the biggest factors. I think the approach would be to only accept poor subsistance farmers from rural areas who were super unlikely to be able to afford treatment counterfactually—my instinct would be to just exclude anyone who lived in any kind of city or even township. I think helping individuals like this could only remain cost-effective if people were identified by our agents, not people “applying” or coming to ask for help or anything like that.
Thanks for your post! As mentioned in other comments, one central factor to understand how cost-effective your procedure appears, could be the cost of having a medical professional as you are (or a person with the minimum required medical expertise and local context knowledge) spend their time roaming, (incentivizing people to meet them, this one was easy for you and probably always is), meeting people and identifying patients to support. Could you roughly estimate these costs per case if you were to do that as your main occupation?
The second part of it, paying for their treatment, seems like something that could be rather easy (much uncertainty here ofc) to do when embedded into the right framing. As pointed out by Jason and others in the comments, these are patients with very tangible, heart-warming stories and very obvious direct impact-connection to a donation, which makes them suitable for successful fundraising within the broader non-EA target-groups.
This is of course without evaluating the potentially quickly arising adverse effects such as the deterioration of informal institutions of local fundraising among families and friends due to them pointing potential patients to you etc..
Thanks Gewind for the insights
I haven’t got this far in terms of estimating the costs of doing it at a bigger scale—after this trial I was probably a little less enthusiastic about the idea than before I started to be honest so I probably won’t go ahead and do that right now anyway.
I don’t think I’m a person with the minimum required medical knowledge at all though, it would be harder for others but doable.
The adverse effects you speak of is certainly a real risk but I don’t think one of the biggest factors. I think the approach would be to only accept poor subsistance farmers from rural areas who were super unlikely to be able to afford treatment counterfactually—my instinct would be to just exclude anyone who lived in any kind of city or even township. I think helping individuals like this could only remain cost-effective if people were identified by our agents, not people “applying” or coming to ask for help or anything like that.