Great question. Top three reasons: 1) There are many benefits from delivering newborns in health clinics outside of Nevirapine. 2) It would be much more challenging to reach all of the traditional birth attendants, maintain constant supply of Nevirapine, and monitor proper administration. Moreover, in our case, the cost of the program is the cash transfers and this is a large benefit for program participants. 3) Traditional birth attendants do not consistently test women for HIV when they deliver, because of various reasons (one being it is bad for business to share negative news).
I think this is a great game and a portrayal of reality where a small number of people get most of the wealth, a 50% number are middle class with enough to be just okay (or at 1) and with a still a very large number who can barely have a comfortable life (say $4k/month household income).
In all seriousness, can somebody please help me understand what can be bought for $1.9 and how they came up with this arbitrary number?! I don't know if anybody can even get (or cook) one full meal a day for that... maybe I'm missing something?
Why even have such a measure unless it's going to be at least $10/day as one likely needs at least that much just to feed themselves the cheapest possible food they can find.
It's important to note that GiveWell is not necessarily pushing in this direction yet. Instead, they are placing bets that they potentially think could have a huge payoff if done right.
CCTs can be very effective or completely ineffective. This is because the second "C" matters a lot. What the program conditions makes all the difference. If the program is focusing on incentivizing interventions that are not cost-effective, the CCT won't be cost-effective because the underlying focus is too costly. Another aspect is what the long-term effects of the program are when the incentive ends. In our case, we are focusing on HIV transmission from mothers to infants and neonatal death. Our temporary incentives have a long-lasting effect by saving a child from getting HIV or a newborn from dying. However, if you were to have a CCT for something that is not life or death and would be needed throughout one's lifetime, the cost would potentially be too high.
Some of the most successful CCTs are for immunizations. This is because immunizations are a proven cost-effective health intervention in the first place. So adding the small CCT to increase coverage maintains cost-effectiveness while achieving benefits from having a greater percent of the population that is immunized.
Great question! The key is in what way are we using tech. Our model, conditional cash transfers (CCTs), has been used for many years by governments in several contexts. We are not inventing anything new by any means. However, our manner of implementation is trying to innovate by reducing some of the biggest challenges these government programs face: corruption and accountability.
For example, without technology we'd be facing the same issue as the Nigerian government (the country we work in): ghost beneficiaries. By taking advantage of currently available biometric solutions, we reduce this and increase the likelihood that our money goes to real beneficiaries. We are wary of adopting technology unless it is absolutely necessary. Another way we use technology is to collect data in the field. We are working in remote, rural areas with high levels of rainfall so we use mobile apps to collect data. This helps reduce the amount of data compromised and also provides an additional layer of verification: by seeing timestamps and knowing exactly who edits what and when. This helps us maintain higher levels of accountability and identify early warning signs of potential fraud.
My wife runs an early stage charity called New Incentives supported by Givewell, hoping to become a candidate for their top charity recommendation.
They use an evidence-backed model called conditional cash transfers. They give money to disadvantaged pregnant women when they achieve health goals that increase the probability of their child's survival (example: activities to reduce HIV transmission from mothers to babies).
The whole organization is a mobile-first organization using biometrics for verification (because technology is the best way to cut across corruption) and they work on many interesting operational challenges. The organization could really use the help of more engineers, especially Android app developers, to tackle some of these challenges.
If anyone is interested, please respond to this comment or ping me.
Only if the funds are shared between the two people fighting the lawsuit... In the current market, the entity spending the most money generally wins. This needs to go away first and it can go away if both (or all) entities in a lawsuit have to pool and divide the resources. This should help equalize the ground a little bit.
If Playboy wants to be a fashion magazine, it will probably not remain one only for men. If it does, well... they won't make much money because women probably make up a large majority of fashion purchasers. I think if Playboy started talking about women business leaders, they could turn some heads. Honestly, I love me a smart business lady with chops, especially when she's not nude and has achieved a lot more than I probably will.
Playboy should relaunch itself as a women empowerment magazine. There is a strong sense of empowerment for women to pose nude and playboy helped bring about this revolution (or can take some claim for it). We don't need another Vice but we do need a magazine that interviewed the likes of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to do interviews on women leaders. It should be remembered that Christie Hefner has probably directed the company for a lot of its history and was instrumental in its development. In many ways, playboy is not inherently sexist or undermining women (do we consider a nude men's magazine to undermine men? no so the argument carries itself quite well I think).
If you're an active twitter user, you likely know how it works. But otherwise, the @ mentions etc. are not very simple w/o somebody teaching you. And even after that, it can seem difficult.
I agree. In fact, I half expected them to write alphabet (name of the company). I wasn't aware of the new logo and had browsed to Google.com to search for something.
Google voice is amazing! I travel all over the world, in fact, haven't been to the US for two years, and I haven't found anything as good and cheap (free).
The concept of Uber (i.e., being able to reliably call a taxi from the phone) has a lot of value but there are significant competitive advantages of being the first to a customer's phone or by being the cheaper option to get adoption.
Hate to simplify it, but in many ways what we saw with Uber was similar to GroupOn. Uber will likely collapse, let's hope it does not take the tech market down with it. Although, I'm all for bubbles bursting and markets normalizing.
Given your motivations and comments, I would recommend that you have a whatsapp like subscription in place. One can get around paying for the subcription by inviting friends. For best results, make it easy enough to select all for the invite [you will soon realize that you'll get most of your users from such people who don't mind inviting a friend to an app they like a lot]. At some point in the next 1-2 years, you would likely get to 1 million downloads!
If you like the idea of giving such an income (or cash transfer) to people but the idea of an unconditional basic income seems too far away, you can contribute to newincentives.org which is providing cash transfers to poor pregnant HIV mothers. Achieves two goals: reduces HIV and puts money in very needy hands.
Slightly off-topic: In case you are looking for a no strings attached place to donate, where money is given to women with the incentive of helping them deliver non-HIV babies, then donate to newincentives.org.
As somebody who has gone through immigration hell in US and abroad, I can tell you that having a lawyer by your side is very beneficial. I used Gotcher Law in California (although, location doesn't really matter) and they have been amazing. Let me know if you want a reference.
Finally, somebody being smart enough to give unlimited storage. One of the primary reasons gmail took off was unlimited storage, at a time when people were very space conscious and had to keep deleting emails.