Footnotes for "Why ongoing assessment of top charities leads to more impact: HKI’s vitamin A supplementation program" blog post
[1] "The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that all preschool-aged children (aged 6 to 59 months) in areas where vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a public health problem receive vitamin A supplements two to three times per year." (GiveWell, Helen Keller International's Vitamin A Supplementation Program, November 2019)
[2] "There is strong evidence from many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in the 1980s and 1990s that VAS can substantially reduce child mortality, but weaker evidence on how effective VAS is in the places HKI would work with additional funding in the next few years."
"We are uncertain whether VAS might have an impact on all mortalities caused by infectious diseases, or only a subset of specific infectious diseases. (It does not seem plausible to us that VAS could have an impact on other causes of child mortality, like accidents.)"
(GiveWell, Helen Keller International's Vitamin A Supplementation Program, November 2019)
[3] "HKI has proposed using additional funding to support VAS campaigns in Bauchi State, Nigeria. HKI believes that VAS coverage in 2018 was low (~30%). HKI told us that it could use $2.4 million between 2020 and 2022 to support VAS campaigns in Bauchi."
See also footnote 157. The mention of NNHS in this footnote refers to Nigeria’s National Nutrition and Health Survey.
(GiveWell, Helen Keller International's Vitamin A Supplementation Program, November 2019)
[4] "In addition to granting $2.6 million in Q3 discretionary funding, in November 2019, we recommended that Open Philanthropy grant $9.7 million to HKI’s VAS program, for a total of $12.3 million. This funding will enable HKI to spend:
- "$5.5 million to continue its work in five countries (Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Niger), including supplementing its budgets in 2020 and 2021 and extending its funding runway to 2022.
- "$4.5 million to start a new program in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with funding to cover 2020-2022.
- "$2.4 million to expand its program to Bauchi State, Nigeria, with funding to cover 2020-2022.
"We believe that Q3 discretionary funding will be pooled with the Open Philanthropy grant to enable the above; we don’t restrict discretionary funds to a particular piece of HKI’s VAS work, and see all of the above as valuable.
"This work is highly cost-effective. We estimate that it is 28 times as cost-effective as cash transfers (“28x cash”) overall, and, by country, ranges from 19x cash to 38x cash." (The GiveWell Blog, Allocation of discretionary funds from Q3 2019, December 19, 2019)
[5] Email from Andrew Martin, Senior Research Analyst at GiveWell, to David Doledec and Rolf Klemm of HKI, November 11, 2019 (unpublished).
[6] Email from Rolf Klemm, Vice President of Nutrition at HKI, February 6, 2020 (unpublished).
[7] Email from Rolf Klemm, Vice President of Nutrition at HKI, February 6, 2020 (unpublished).
[8] Email from Rolf Klemm, Vice President of Nutrition at HKI, February 6, 2020 (unpublished).