We’re crossposting a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives promotes vaccination in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers. Recently, one of New Incentives’ field officers wrote about his experience collecting program data.
GiveWell asks all of our Top Charities to share detailed monitoring information, which we review to assess the quality of program implementation and the number of children reached. We also use this data as part of our cost-effectiveness analyses, which are the basis of our funding decisions.
We’re sharing this post to provide a firsthand account of how that monitoring data is collected. We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. Still, we hope Sanusi’s experience opens one small window into the efforts our Top Charities take to ensure high-quality implementation; for more rigorous information about the extent of New Incentives’ monitoring and evaluation efforts, see this section of our review of the program.
You can read the original post on New Incentives’ website, and sign up for New Incentives’ email newsletter here.
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Boats, Motorbikes, and Vaccines: My Travels to Hard-to-Reach Areas of Nigeria to Collect High-Quality Data
Sanusi Bala Sanusi, January 25, 2024
As a field officer conducting rapid assessments, my job involves traveling to remote, hard-to-reach communities to interview caregivers and collect data on immunization coverage in their community. Along with either a community leader or someone they assign to help, I work to obtain reliable, evidenced-based, and actionable data from the caregivers for proper planning and interventions by New Incentives in northern Nigeria.
Rapid assessments are coverage monitoring surveys that typically take place every six months to measure the proportion of vaccinated children in a given geographic area, along with other related indicators, giving the organization an estimate of its ongoing impact on vaccination coverage. (Learn more about this data.)
Before starting an initial screening, I get verbal and written consent to proceed with the survey. I explain to caregivers that our discussions are strictly confidential and solely for use by New Incentives – All Babies Are Equal (NI-ABAE—this is how the organization is referred to in Nigeria) for internal decision-making processes and future interventions, also noting that overall results will be shared