EA - r.i.c.e.'s neonatal lifesaving partnership is funded by GiveWell; a description of what we do by deanspears

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: r.i.c.e.'s neonatal lifesaving partnership is funded by GiveWell; a description of what we do, published by deanspears on December 9, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.[The Forum found an unexpected way to help! A previous version of this post mistakenly suggested that a large donation from GiveWell risked changing r.i.c.e. from a public charity to a private foundation. We previously experienced this sort of risk with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We are very excited to learn from a Forum poster that GiveWell poses no such risk! Thank you! While we are still accepting additional donations to improve the health of a larger number of babies, there is no additional urgency to maintain the charity status of r.i.c.e.]I’m writing on behalf of my team at r.i.c.e., which is honored to be highlighted in GiveWell’s “Our recommendations for giving in 2022” post. In this post, I present the details of our program that prevents neonatal deaths inexpensively by causing the implementation of a Kangaroo Mother Care program in India.A description of our work, in briefSome of you may be familiar with my work in population ethics or as Director of the Population Wellbeing Initiative at UT-Austin (or, more likely, for distributing utilitarianism t-shirts). Since long before this phase of my career, I’ve also been Executive Director of r.i.c.e., a 501(c)3 public charity working on early-life health in rural north India.In collaboration with the Government of Uttar Pradesh and an organization in India, we support a Kangaroo Mother Care program to promote neonatal survival in a context where low birth weight babies would not otherwise receive such lifesaving care. KMC is a well-established tool for preventing deaths that we did not invent. Instead, our contribution is managerial innovation: We developed a public-private partnership to cause the government’s KMC guidelines to in fact be implemented cost-effectively in a public hospital where many low birth weight babies are born. That public healthcare systems in developing countries fail to implement life-saving policies and programs is a well-known problem in global health and in development economics.Because KMC is known to prevent neonatal death, and because the collaboration that we fostered found new ways to overcome the barriers to implementation in a context where many babies are not otherwise receiving needed care, it is not surprising that we can prevent neonatal deaths inexpensively.Our statistics show that we save lives very cost-effectively; indeed, about as inexpensively as any life-saving program known to EA. These statistics led to investments this year by two EA funders: first by Founders Pledge and then by GiveWell, after in-depth investigations of our work and our evidence. We have big plans for 2023, including continuing to save lives, starting a formal impact evaluation, and doing the advocacy and partnership-building needed to scale up the program to more districts.If you would like to further support this work, please donate to r.i.c.e. at this link to PayPal. It will let you donate either one time or by establishing a recurring monthly donation. If you don’t like PayPal, you can mail a check to RICE Institute, Inc., 472 Old Colchester Rd, Amston, CT 06231.Longer set of detailsWhat is Kangaroo Mother Care and why is it good?Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) is a way to inexpensively keep low birth weight babies (and other neonates) clean, fed, and warm. Here is GiveWell’s summary of Kangaroo Mother Care in general. It is a bit broader than our program. To emphasize: KMC has been well-known to save lives for years. Our workwomanlike contribution is merely to get it implemented in a place where there are lots of low birth weight babies, in part because mothers are themselves often underweigh...