There are interventions that we believe are – or may be (pending a literature review) – very well supported by evidence, that we’ve been unable to find charities focused on. In 2012, we put a significant amount of effort into trying to find ways donors could pay for further delivery of these interventions, even if it required working with a large organization (such as UNICEF or GAVI) rather than with a small charity dedicated to the intervention in question. Good Ventures played a major role in these investigations and was particularly helpful in getting engagement from these larger organizations.

The bulk of our efforts focused on immunizations – which we consider to have the strongest evidence base of any intervention we know of – and micronutrient supplementation (particularly salt iodization and vitamin A supplementation, which we perceive as the most evidence-supported micronutrient interventions; writeups on these interventions are forthcoming).

Despite substantial effort, we did not find any such giving opportunities. The basic pattern we saw was that:

Government and multilateral funders provide substantial funding for these interventions.

It often appears that the greatest obstacle to universal coverage is a logistical bottleneck rather than a simple lack of funding for more direct execution.

We asked persistently for areas where more funding was needed to do more direct delivery. In many cases, we were told that there were opportunities, but then (a) these opportunities became funded by others while we were investigating them, or (b) we tried to follow up on these opportunities and ultimately were met with unresponsiveness, and/or concluded that funding was not the primary bottleneck to progress in these cases.

Overall, this pattern of observations fits a model in which the most proven, cost-effective interventions are often already being appropriately funded by the international community (though not in every single case; LLIN distribution is the clearest exception we’ve found).

Unfortunately, many of the details of our investigations cannot be shared, because the organizations we worked with sometimes shared information only under condition of confidentiality. What we can share is the following:

For the time being, we’ve provisionally concluded that