Hi Vasco, Great question we’ve been looking into for a while now. We indeed use cost-effectiveness as one factor to decide which organizations to support more intensively. We also look at other factors.
The research base (and practicing MEL) is not yet very well developed for animal interventions. Also, interventions that are cost-effective now, might not be in a few years from now if e.g. the context changes. Besides the evidence base not being robust (yet), it is also more difficult to assess the longer-term effects of interventions.
MEL can contribute to building an evidence base for interventions and to know when to pivot or scale. It is therefore important for The Mission Motor to not only support interventions that are assessed as being cost-effective and impactful now, but also to help collect data on existing, or novel interventions without a firm evidence base yet, that have the potential to be impactful.
What we’ve landed on is to use a set of proxies primarily for organizations we support longer-term. As said, (potential) cost-effectiveness is a factor, next to other factors such as the ability to grow in MEL capacity (can we still contribute?) and organizational characteristics such as learning attitude, capacity to work on MEL, and a certain stability.
Let me know if you have input or questions plse! We’ll be evaluating this system, and probably updating it regularly.
You’re welcome. Let us know please if you have any questions :)