Evidence Action operates four distinct programs:
Deworm the World, Safe Water Now, Equal Vitamin Access, and Syphilis-Free Start. The latter two were launched via Evidence Action's Accelerator program, whereby promising interventions are piloted and scaled conditional on performance. The Deworm the World Initiative was founded in 2007,
Michael Kremer worked for a year as a teacher in the
Kakamega District of Kenya. He returned to the area with
Rachel Glennerster, his wife, after completing his
PhD, and learned of a local friend's plan to implement a
deworming program in nearby schools. Interested in the effects of the program, he organized a
randomized controlled trial, rolling out treatments in 1998. Results from the experiment were presented by Kremer and
Esther Duflo at the
World Economic Forum in 2007, inspiring the creation of the Deworm the World Initiative, an international deworming campaign incubated by
Innovations for Poverty Action. and helped rolled-out treatment to over 17 million children in the state of
Bihar. In 2013, Evidence Action was founded to manage and scale the Deworm the World Initiative. showing less pronounced effects on attendance and no impact on school performance. They likewise critiqued the original study's lack of
external validity, noting that the original study paired deworming with a health information campaign. In 2015, an article in
PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases criticized the
Cochrane review, arguing that it included an unnecessarily limited number of studies, and that
RCTs often understate effects by treating both those with heavy and light worm burdens. Writing of his analysis of the replications,
Chris Blattman, then of
Columbia University, wrote that "[t]here are clearly serious problems with the Miguel-Kremer study. But, to be quite frank, you have throw so much crazy sh*t at Miguel-Kremer to make the result go away that I believe the result even more than when I started." Their results suggest that deworming produces a 37% annualized rate of return. Evidence Action's program in
Bihar, first implemented in 2011, reached 80% of its target population, substantially exceeding
World Health Organization guidelines. By 2015, the Government of India expanded the program nationally, treating 89.9 million children.
Safe Water Now Evidence Action also operates a point-of-collection water chlorination program called Safe Water Now. The scheme was incubated by
Innovations for Poverty Action, and was founded in response to a series of
randomized controlled trials conducted by
Michael Kremer,
Edward Miguel,
Sendhil Mullainathan, Clair Null, and Alix Zwane in
Kenya between 2004 and 2010. The
RCT found that a combination of local advertising campaigns and chlorine distribution systems strategically located near water wells increased the likelihood that households treated their water. Subsequent work by Kremer,
Johannes Haushofer, Ricardo Maertens, and Brandon Joel Tan showed that this increase in chlorination take-up translated into improved health, with treatment causing a reduction in child (i.e. under five) mortality of 1.4 percentage points, a 63% decline from baseline. The program was found to significantly exceed
World Health Organization cost effectiveness standards, and was identified by Evidence Action as a scalable, low cost, and high impact intervention, saving lives for an estimated $1,941. receiving the 2019
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside
Esther Duflo As of mid-2019, Safe Water Now provided chlorination services to 4 million people, a number that has grown to over 10 million in 2023.
Syphilis-Free Start and Equal Vitamin Access Evidence Action also operates an Accelerator program, whereby promising, cost-effective health and nutrition interventions are scaled and tested iteratively according to a
venture capital model. despite support from the
World Health Organization. In 2020, Evidence Action partnered with the government of
Liberia to fill this gap, piloting dual testing for
syphilis and HIV in
Montserrado County. By 2022, rates of screening had grown by 61 percentage points, from a baseline of 6%. Evidence Action also operates Equal Vitamin Access, a program that provides
iron and
folic acid supplementation to children in regions where
anemia and other nutritional deficiencies are common.
No Lean Season From 2014 to 2019, Evidence Action ran an additional program called No Lean Season that offered financial incentives to farm workers to migrate to nearby cities during the
monga, a period of seasonal famine coinciding with the agricultural off season in
Bangladesh. The scheme was based on a similar program studied by Gharad Bryan, Shyamal Chowdhury, and
Mushfiq Mobarak in a
randomized controlled trial in which
Bangladeshi farm workers were given low interest loans to migrate to nearby cities. The program increased the incomes of households that sent seasonal migrants, and raised the likelihood of migration in future years (even if incentives were not actively provided). and been scaled to 699 villages and 170,000 households In response, Evidence Action ended its relationship with RDRS, and canceled No Lean Season, which was previously ranked among the most effective destinations for charitable donations by
GiveWell. == Funding ==