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 for sharing your thoughts on this very interesting topic!
Did you consider the impact that companies like or in particular Elon Musk’s Starlink is going to have on the situation? Starlink seems to be focusing their efforts exactly at countries like those studied here, countries with high entry-costs for cable-bound telecom means which they don’t have since they already largely invested in their now existing satellite fleet and a significant remaining gap in the population without access to telecoms.
Without knowing much about it, it seems to make much sense to run a business model that is based on either very low prices for those that weren’t able to afford telecoms before Starlink and/or heavy advantage over the existing (weak) competition in terms of quality. Looking at Starlink’s current activities, they could change the situation in many LMICs drastically within a few years.
That being said, I have also heard that Starlink seems to be quite expensive to deploy atm (but as before, I’m no expert on the topic).
Starlink is AFAIK a much discussed topic at least in Mozambique, Nigeria and Zimbabwe atm.