EA - Requesting feedback: proposal for a new nonprofit with potential to become highly effective by Marshall

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: Requesting feedback: proposal for a new nonprofit with potential to become highly effective, published by Marshall on September 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR I make the case for funding a new initiative that addresses an important, tractable, and neglected problem with potential to reach GiveWell-level cost-effectiveness. Please review this and share your thoughts! Millions of people die every year from preventable conditions, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Some of these deaths can be avoided by improving health workers’ skills and knowledge. Working with a nonprofit, I’ve been piloting a way to train health workers online with a scrappy WordPress-based MVP, and still getting good results. I’m looking for funding to create and scale a solution that’s 10X better than anything that exists. Why I’m sharing this I’m pretty new to EA and I’d like to submit a version of this to EA organizations for funding. I’m seeking feedback to help make this as clear, logical, and succinct as possible. Importance: what is the scale of problems that can be addressed with health worker training? Every year, there are tens of millions of deaths that can be averted with simple interventions, including: 2.9 million deaths of newborn babies readily preventable with standard care, 1.5 million deaths caused by diarrheal diseases; many of which can be averted with improved sanitation practices and low-cost treatment, 2.5 million deaths caused by lower respiratory infections; some of which can be prevented with appropriate diagnosis and treatment, and 10.8 million deaths caused by high blood pressure, which is inexpensively controlled with generic medications. Pandemics are an equally important global problem. COVID-19 has caused an estimated 17.5 million deaths. Unfortunately, experts agree that COVID-19 isn’t a worst-case scenario: future pandemics could pose an existential threat to humanity. These problems and their causes have an uneven global distribution. Newborn deaths, lower respiratory infections, and diarrheal disease, in particular, are concentrated in LMICs. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, LMICs are particularly susceptible to epidemics. Solutions to these problems must be implemented in LMICs. Tractability: how can online health worker training solve these problems? There is ample evidence that health worker (HW) training can have benefits on its own or when combined with other interventions. My analysis of existing research studies shows that training HWs to properly care for newborn babies is likely to be highly cost-effective, with an average cost of $59 per DALY averted ($100 per DALY averted is sometimes cited as a benchmark for highly effective interventions). Please see the full forum post for the details of this analysis. Management of childhood illness training, which covers simple interventions (such as appropriately diagnosing and treating lower respiratory infections and diarrhea), measurably improves HW clinical skills. A recent study estimated that properly training HWs and giving them personal protective equipment would have saved $7.2 billion in just the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decisions that HWs make early in a disease outbreak can save countless lives. Notably, a doctor who acted quickly to quarantine a sick traveler is credited with stopping the spread of Ebola into Nigeria in 2014. HWs need to be well trained to be ready to make these critical decisions at any time. There is also emerging evidence that online learning is an effective way to train HWs. Online neonatal care training leads to significant knowledge and skills gains among HWs. The infection control training I’ve been working on has high completion rates, learning gains comparable to those seen in more resource-intensive in-person t...