Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) — Operational Grant (December 2022)

Note: This page summarizes the rationale behind a GiveWell grant to Yale University’s Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). Y-RISE staff reviewed this page prior to publication.

Published: June 2023

The initiative and its model

The Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) identifies and tests promising health and livelihood interventions, conducts research on the challenges and implications of scale as interventions grow, and works to build the field of researchers and implementers interested in the science of scaling.1

Y-RISE began in 2017, and its main model focuses on working with affiliated researchers and institutions to examine the complexities of taking a development project to scale.2 It has worked on projects including incentives for migration, COVID-19 vaccine uptake, vaccination programs, workforce development, electrification efforts, mental health initiatives, climate resilience interventions, and more.3

Y-RISE core activities

Y-RISE has three main workstreams:

• It partners with implementing organizations to examine and implement interventions at scale through research projects.4
• It works through institutional partnerships to scale promising programs.5
• It maintains a network of affiliated researchers and aims to continue to build its network in other ways, such as workshops, training, and an annual conference.6

The grant

This grant to Y-RISE will support a portion of its core operations from July 2023 to June 2026.7 Y-RISE plans to expand its capacity by hiring more staff to work on more research projects, develop methodological innovations for its research, and focus on institutional partnerships.8

During the grant period, GiveWell and Y-RISE will meet regularly to exchange learnings and discuss potential research opportunities and partnerships with implementing organizations.9

Budget for grant activities

GiveWell recommended funding for close to 11% of the Y-RISE five-year core budget Aside from the indirect costs, GiveWell's grant has not been explicitly allocated to budget categories.10

Proportionally, the full Y-RISE core budget11 includes:

• 77% for staff costs for the core Y-RISE team, housed at Yale MacMillan Center
• 10% for Y-RISE annual conference
• 8% for administrative costs including office expenses, technology, and travel costs
• 4% for project development seed grants for faculty affiliates and postdocs
• 2% for outreach costs for design and production

The case for the grant

• Research on the best ways to scale health and livelihood interventions seems relatively neglected. Our impression is that research on the best ways to scale health and livelihood interventions is not incentivized or well-funded.12 We think that supporting Y-RISE in building an academic network that is thinking about issues of scaling interventions could lead to more and better research in this area, by both Y-RISE and its affiliated researchers.13 This research could in turn lead to more evidence-based programs being scaled successfully or improved outcomes for programs that are implemented at scale.
• This research area is important to GiveWell and other funders. We think there are many interventions that look promising at a small scale but that have not yet been tested at significant scale.14 Though we typically gather data such as coverage surveys and other routine monitoring and evaluation of programs to which we recommend funding, we would benefit from more rigorous thinking about the potential challenges and effects of these programs delivered at scale. The Y-RISE team and network of affiliated researchers could improve the decisions that GiveWell and other funders make by generating relevant research findings, working directly with grantees to support them in taking new interventions to scale, and acting as a thought partner to GiveWell.15
• We think the team is high-quality. We have experience working with the Y-RISE faculty director Dr. Musfiq Mobarak and broadly have a positive impression of the other members of the Y-RISE team.16 Dr. Mobarak has a history of producing informative research related to the challenges of bringing programs to scale, including research on the former GiveWell top charity No Lean Season.17
• Y-RISE’s work with BRAC and the World Health Organization (WHO) could open up highly impactful opportunities. Y-RISE is building partnerships aimed at bringing evidence-based interventions to scale with institutions such as BRAC and WHO,18 which have large scale and wide reach. We think these partnerships could open up opportunities to bring more evidence-based interventions to scale or improve the effectiveness of those interventions.

Risks and reservations

• We think it’s likely that Y-RISE would eventually fill most of its funding gap. Y-RISE has been working on fundraising and had already raised $3.2 million for 2023-2025 before GiveWell recommended this grant.19 We would guess that it would be able to raise more funding to help fill the remaining gap before running out of runway in 2024-2025. However, we think it benefits Y-RISE to help ensure some stability, allowing the team to stop spending efforts on fundraising and start focusing on the work itself. This could be the wrong approach, as it could also be beneficial for Y-RISE to bring in other funders.
• Y-RISE doesn’t have clearly articulated goals for what it will achieve by the end of its 2025 fiscal year. The team is exploring several different workstreams, such as forming institutional partnerships and building a network of affiliated researchers, and as a result, we don’t have clear visibility into what outcomes it will achieve with its portfolio of work.
• We have not yet agreed on the details of how Y-RISE will work with GiveWell. It’s possible that partnering with Y-RISE may end up being less fruitful than we think, in terms of producing research that’s useful to GiveWell and other organizations in scaling programs or in having Y-RISE as a thought partner.
• It’s possible that Y-RISE’s work won’t influence the field that much. Though we think there is a need beyond GiveWell's for work on the science of scaling effectively, it’s possible that the work won’t make much of an impact and that other development organizations won’t be as interested in Y-RISE’s work and results.

Plans for follow up

• We will meet monthly with the Y-RISE team to exchange ideas about interventions, and we’ll develop a concrete plan for how GiveWell and Y-RISE can best work together.
• We’ll complete 6-month check-ins to assess how the work is going relative to expectations.
• We’ll follow up on the forecasts below to see whether they were realized.
• This grant is not eligible for renewal. It’s possible that GiveWell would decide to recommend funding to Y-RISE to support its work on a specific research project or for its work directly with an implementing organization.

Internal forecasts

For this grant, we are recording the following forecasts:

Confidence	Prediction	By time​​
70%	GiveWell will recommend at least one grant to Y-RISE to partner with an implementing organization as they scale a GiveWell-funded program.	December 31, 2024
50%	GiveWell will recommend at least two grants to Y-RISE to partner with an implementing organization as they scale a GiveWell-funded program.	December 31, 2024
65%	Y-RISE will begin large-scale implementation research alongside an institutional partner (either BRAC or WHO).	December 31, 2024
80%	The Y-RISE core program will be fully funded from other sources for 2026 without additional GiveWell grants.	December 31, 2025

Our process

• We’ve worked with Dr. Mushfiq Mobarak on previous projects, including research on Evidence Action’s No Lean Season and a randomized controlled trial of mask use in Bangladesh. We learned about Y-RISE in conversations with Dr. Mobarak.
• We had one call with Y-RISE leadership to discuss Y-RISE’s goals and plans.
• Y-RISE submitted a budget and proposal to GiveWell.

Sources

Document	Source
Akram, Chowdhury, and Mobarak 2017	Source
Bannerjee et al. 2019	Source
Bryan, Chowdhury, and Mobarak 2014	Source
GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Innovations for Poverty Action, February 27, 2018	Source
GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Y-RISE, November 14, 2022	Source
GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of conversations with Dr. Anne Karing and Innovations for Poverty Action, February 7th and May 15th, 2020	Source
Lagakos et al. 2020	Source (archive)
Lagakos, Mobarak, and Waugh 2018	Source (archive)
Y-RISE, "Featured Projects"	Source (archive)
Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022	Source
Y-RISE, budget, 2022	Source

• 1
  • “Y-RISE works across the various stages in scaling a program, from ideation and design to implementation, providing research, expertise, data management, and coordination. It also holds an annual conference for its network affiliates and partners to explore the complexities of scaling.” GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Y-RISE, November 14, 2022, p. 1.
  • "Y-RISE teams work through research projects in collaboration with implementing organizations to outline scaling complexities… At Y-RISE however, we believe that scaling research should not involve a trade-off between rigorous research and a delay in implementation: accordingly, we are focused on forming long-term partnerships with institutions and implementing organizations to iterate on and continuously improve programs as they scale. Finally, we engage in network building as we believe that there is a need to build the field of scaling research as an area of scientific inquiry, both for researchers and for practitioners, to ensure the right collaborations and skill sets." Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 1-2.

• 2

  "The Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) is likely the only center dedicated entirely to studying the complexities of scaling interventions. One of its goals is to generate new research on scaling and make it useful for policymakers. It has created a network of academic researchers to engage in this research. … Systemic change requires long-term partnerships with sophisticated institutions that work in multiple countries. Y-RISE has two major partnerships, one with BRAC and the other with the World Health Organization (WHO)." GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Y-RISE, November 14, 2022, pp. 1, 5.

• 3

  "Y-RISE and affiliated researchers have engaged in research on a number of programs, including:

  • Migration incentives for seasonal poverty
  • COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Sierra Leone
  • Replicating and scaling "access first" vaccination programs
  • Workforce development
  • Electrification efforts

  These projects are in various stages—some are funded and moving forward, others are in initial implementation stages, and in other cases Y-RISE is talking with potential implementation partners. Other research projects are in initial scoping and proposal phases. These include:

  • Mental health initiatives
  • Climate resilience interventions
  • Healthy nutrition in schools in Jamaica
  • Bunded vaccination in Sierra Leone
  • Electrification outages advocacy

  Y-RISE is supporting research in many areas, understanding that some of those efforts are likely to result in opportunities for scaling, while others are likely to show that the programs are not likely to be effective at scale." GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Y-RISE, November 14, 2022, pp. 2-3.

• 4

  "Y-RISE teams work through research projects in collaboration with implementing organizations to outline scaling complexities." Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 1.
  “Projects involve examining complexities of scale around promising interventions. These projects are typically multi-year, multi-site projects and bring together a diverse group of researchers with a variety of analytical tools to synthesize evidence on whether and how a program should scale. Y-RISE centrally coordinates this work. The advantage of this model is that it generates economies of scale by establishing research infrastructure, harmonized data collection and research coordination across multiple sites. Research projects provide rigorous evidence to policy makers about potential risks, benefits, cost-effectiveness and implementation considerations as programs scale.
  The Y-RISE team is currently working on a variety of projects: entrepreneur training, seasonal poverty alleviation, counseling for mental health, improving health services such as vaccination in remote, hard-to-reach areas, and encouraging healthy behaviors in schools.” Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 2.

• 5

  "Institutional Partnerships: Partnerships ensure that scaling research can help to iterate and expand programs in real time. Currently, we are setting up two such partnerships:

  • BRAC Science of Scaling Lab builds on successes and failures of scaling initiatives in the Global South by leveraging BRAC’s implementation capabilities and Y-RISE research capacity. The lab will identify, co-create, evaluate, iterate and scale effective programs. While the program will initially be anchored in Bangladesh, we are planning for the model to be tested across BRAC’s operations in sub-Saharan Africa and ultimately, through advocacy by governments around the world.
  • WHO Partnership: Y-RISE and the World Health Organization (WHO) Behavioral Insights (BI) Unit will partner with governments of various countries to design, test and scale programs for improving health behaviors and the uptake of health technologies. WHO BI Team has had promising discussions with the local governments to design and scale programs around improving health behaviors in schools e.g., choosing healthy options, increasing water intake, increasing exercise and movement and improving mental health. We hope to extend this partnership to more health behaviors in other countries, focusing on the barriers to scaling behavioral interventions for health."
    Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 2.

• 6

  “Finally, we engage in network building as we believe that there is a need to build the field of scaling research as an area of scientific inquiry, both for researchers and for practitioners, to ensure the right collaborations and skill sets…Network building helps advance the field and build new collaborations.

  • Y- RISE Annual Conference: Our annual conference brings together network affiliates and policymakers to discuss research on topics of scaling complexity: spillovers and general equilibrium, external validity and evidence aggregation, political economy and macro- economic effects. We will also have policy discussions around workforce development, seasonal poverty alleviation, behavioral interventions for public health and electrification.
  • Y-RISE is a key member of the Structural Research and Economic Growth (STEG) initiative funded by FCDO. We will be conducting a policy makers workshop around topics of workforce development and electrification in 2022-2023.
  • Science of Scaling Training: Sep 2022 marked our second successful training with members of the Inter-American Development Bank, following positive feedback of a similar training program for more than fifty employees in September 2021. We hope to conduct many more such training programs for organizations and funders in future.”

  Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, pp. 2-3.

• 7

  “Our ask from GiveWell is a total of $4.18 MM for five years, but critically for a total of $1.23 MM
  over the next two years: approximately $307,000 FY 2024 (Jul 23 - Jun 24) and $921,000 for FY 25
  (Jul 24- Jun 26).” Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 3.

• 8

  “With our current budget of approximately $1.28 MM each year, we estimate that we will have results of around 2-3 projects examining the complexities of scale within 3-5 years. In addition, we would have disseminated the message around Y-RISE through the Annual Conference.
  With the increased funding support that we have budgeted for, we can significantly expand our output. We will have results from 3-5 major projects across a variety of areas to have cross-cutting lessons on complexities of scale. We will increase seed funding to affiliates to develop innovations around new sources of data and ways to examine complexities of scale. We will be able to develop the BRAC and WHO partnerships more quickly with focused support and seed funding. Finally, we will be able to reach a critical audience of policy makers with focused funding. As we saw with support for outreach on the mask-wearing project, the “no strings” funding for communication & policy work enabled us to quickly move forward with partnership opportunities, widely disseminate findings and ensure the impact of increasing mask-wearing at a critical time.” Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 4.

• 9

  “Y-RISE believes that a step-by-step funding approach, in which GiveWell and Y-RISE reflect on the partnership as it develops, may be more appropriate than a larger initial grant. Such an approach parallels Y-RISE's approach to scaling, which moves in a stepwise fashion, exploring the new questions and complexities that arise at each level of scale.
  Y-RISE believes that having support for its core activities, such as network building, and then engaging in ongoing conversations with GiveWell about additional research projects would be a fruitful way to partner. If GiveWell had particular interventions that it was interested in scaling, Y-RISE could work with GiveWell to think through the complexities, whether additional research would be useful, and whether the research would be of interest to the members of Y-RISE's network.” GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Y-RISE, November 14, 2022, p. 6.

• 10

  Y-RISE's 5-year budget total for core expenses is $11,539,023. Y-RISE's initial ask to GiveWell, which was based on its expected funding gap through 2025, was $1,227,288, or 10.6% of this total core expense. GiveWell's final grant of $1,350,017 covers Y-RISE's initial ask of $1,227,288 plus an additional 10% for indirect costs to Yale University. See Y-RISE, budget, 2022.

• 11
  • See Y-RISE, budget, 2022.
  • Y-RISE expects to fundraise from other donors to fill its remaining core budget gap. It also plans to solicit funding for individual projects when needed.
  • “Y-RISE is funded through a mix of core and project funding. Our core funders included Wellspring Philanthropic Fund and the Yale MacMillan Center. GiveWell also generously allocated some funds for Prof. Mushfiq Mobarak to support the pandemic response work of Y-RISE. We have indicated this in our sources of funding. Project based funders include Wellspring, NSF, Open Philanthropy, STEG, Inter-American Development Bank and Marshall Foundation. These funds are not included in the core budget.” Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 4.

• 12
  • Our general impression is that researchers rarely follow up initial RCTs with further work to demonstrate that interventions work when delivered at significant scale (e.g., region or country-wide).
  • “Academic researchers may need resources to engage in additional research on an existing program because the academy often rewards innovation rather than rewarding additional research on prior innovations.” GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Y-RISE, November 14, 2022, p. 2.

• 13

  For example, Y-RISE research on a migration program required different methods and definitions of success when the program transitioned from an RCT-based intervention to implementation by an NGO at a larger scale. GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Y-RISE, November 14, 2022, p. 3.

• 14
  • For example, we think that community ambassadors to promote vaccination could be a promising intervention, but it hasn’t been tested at scale. We are aware of one RCT, Bannerjee et al. 2019, completed with 521 villages in India. Similarly, kangaroo mother care has been shown to be effective in small-scale RCTs, but implementation has not been rigorously tested at scale. See our intervention report on kangaroo mother care for more on this evidence.
  • Y-RISE previously tested a seasonal migration program, No Lean Season, at scale. Though initial, small-scale RCTs showed that the program was highly effective, larger-scale RCTs did not find an effect. Y-RISE has been generating further research on moderators of the program’s effectiveness at scale. Y-RISE, "Featured Projects"

• 15

  We plan to follow up regularly with Y-RISE on opportunities to improve GiveWell decisions, work directly with grantees, and act as a thought partner to GiveWell.

• 16

  Dr. Mushfiq Mobarak is the faculty director, and our impression is that he is both playing a central role in the research on individual projects and also building out the Y-RISE core strategy. GiveWell has worked with Dr. Mobarak in the past:

  • He worked with Evidence Action’s No Lean Season, which was a GiveWell top charity in 2017-18, to understand general equilibrium and other spillover effects at scale. Evidence Action discontinued its program in 2019, but Dr. Mobarak’s work with No Lean Season continues, as he is aiming to understand how the program could be effective at scale.
  • In July 2020, we recommended a grant to Dr. Mobarak and other researchers to conduct a randomized controlled trial of mask use in Bangladesh. That project was well-conducted and seemed to be impactful. Dr. Mobarak leveraged his connections in Bangladesh to quickly execute a high-quality trial at substantial scale.

  Dr. Neela Saldanha is the Executive Director of Y-RISE and will be supporting strategy, fundraising, operations, and outreach. We have spoken to her several times and are moderately confident that she’s a well-connected operator.

• 17

  Dr. Mobarak's research publications include: Bryan, Chowdhury, and Mobarak 2014; Akram, Chowdhury, and Mobarak 2017; Lagakos, Mobarak, and Waugh 2018; Lagakos et al. 2020.

• 18
  • “Partnerships ensure that scaling research can help to iterate and expand programs in real time. Currently, we are setting up two such partnerships:
    • BRAC Science of Scaling Lab builds on successes and failures of scaling initiatives in the Global South by leveraging BRAC’s implementation capabilities and Y-RISE research capacity. The lab will identify, co-create, evaluate, iterate and scale effective programs. While the program will initially be anchored in Bangladesh, we are planning for the model to be tested across BRAC’s operations in sub-Saharan Africa and ultimately, through advocacy by governments around the world.
    • WHO Partnership: Y-RISE and the World Health Organization (WHO) Behavioral Insights (BI) Unit will partner with governments of various countries to design, test and scale programs for improving health behaviors and the uptake of health technologies. WHO BI Team has had promising discussions with the local governments to design and scale programs around improving health behaviors in schools e.g.,choosing healthy options, increasing water intake, increasing exercise and movement and improving mental health. We hope to extend this partnership to more health behaviors in other countries, focusing on the barriers to scaling behavioral interventions for health.” Y-RISE, Budget narrative, 2022, p. 2.
  • As of April 2023, Y-RISE’s partnership with BRAC now also includes the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD).

• 19

  See the Y-RISE, budget, 2022, row "current funding."