Mobile vaccination with New Incentives

In this blog post, we’re crossposting the work of one of our grantee organizations and top charities: New Incentives, which gives cash incentives for parents and caregivers in Northern Nigeria to take advantage of standard childhood vaccines that are freely available from government clinics. Recently, New Incentives wrote about the experiences of their staff member Idris and a mobile vaccination team on one particular Saturday morning in Kano State, Nigeria.
While most of the vaccinations that New Incentives incentivizes occur at stationary clinics, mobile vaccination teams exist to serve mothers such as Alawiyya, aged 20, who says she lost so much blood during the recent home birth of her child, now three weeks old, that she wasn’t able to walk the few miles to the nearest clinic so baby Aliyu could be vaccinated.
At GiveWell, we direct funds based on careful, rigorous examination of quantitative evidence from academic trials and other on-the-ground research. We worry that simple stories can be misleading, often because they cherry-pick the best-case outcome of a program while obscuring its general impact. They can also result in charitable funding being directed toward more photogenic causes, even when the need might be greater elsewhere.
Nonetheless, we hear from some of our donors that stories and photos help bring the impact of their donations to life, and we think that this vivid example of New Incentives’ work is a great way to experience that. We also think that understanding the logistical details of how programs are implemented, and the varied and specific challenges they face, helps make clear why GiveWell’s detail-oriented, evidence-centric approach is so important.
For example, on this particular day, this mobile vaccination team was able to vaccinate more babies than expected in Alawiyya’s village, Jijiyawa, but only one baby out of the expected five in another village, Yan Gizo. Carefully tracking how many of the eligible babies ultimately get vaccinated is crucial for figuring out how cost-effective the program is.
So we wanted to share the stories of Idris, Alawiyya, and this particular mobile vaccination team on this particular Saturday morning, even while flagging that it’s just one of the 5,900 clinics and 11,130 mobile vaccination sessions that New Incentives staff participated in during January 2024. The plural of “story” is not data, but the stories do

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