NOTIFY HEALTH

STARTED: Incubation Program February-March 2024

Samuel Harvey

Co-founder

CE INCUBATION GRANT: $179,000

MONEY FUNDRAISED TO DATE (Aug 2024): $179,000

Daniel Hanschuh

Co-founder

TEAM SIZE (Aug 2024): 2 FT

EMAIL ADDRESS: info@notifyhealth.org

WEBSITE: https://www.notifyhealth.org/

Effective reminders for childhood vaccination

for a future where ALL children thrive,

free from preventable disease

DESCRIPTION OF THE INTERVENTION

Notify Health aims to increase life-saving vaccination coverage rates in sub-Saharan African countries by implementing a well-evidenced, cost-effective, and scalable intervention: Reminder messages for childhood vaccinations.

We achieve this by:

Creating or identifying databases of children’s birth dates and caregivers’ phone numbers.
Designing informative and persuasive reminders tailored to the local context and selecting the most impactful and cost-effective communication channels and mediums (e.g., SMS, voice, app-based).
Sending messages aligned with the local vaccination schedule at scale and automated through mass-messaging systems.

BACKGROUND OF THE INTERVENTION

Twenty million children still miss out on life-saving vaccines annually, and unfortunately, progress on coverage is stagnating or reversing. As a result, more than 700,000 children die every year, with >50% of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
Vaccination reminders have strong evidence, including multiple RCTs and three Cochrane reviews, indicating that they can increase vaccination rates by several percentage points, including in the contexts in which we plan to operate. The success of GiveWell-funded Suvita provides practical evidence from India that reminders work cost-effectively at scale, reaching down to $4,356 per child death averted.

NEAR-TERM PLANS:

Starting in June 2024, we plan to conduct 3-week scoping visits (each) in two of our top countries (Nigeria, Ethiopia, Angola) to select our pilot location. During these visits, we aim to deepen our understanding of contextual factors (e.g., phone usage, language/culture, vaccination attitudes), the local healthcare system, and the vaccination landscape.
We will meet with potential partners in the government and NGO/implementation sector to obtain approval and execution support for our planned pilot. Before launching our pilot, we will conduct a needs assessment, set up our mass messaging system, and design reminder messages.
Later in the year, we aim to test our program with a three-month pilot to create a locally adapted intervention that we can expand on a regional and national scale.

PREDICTED IMPACT:

Our preliminary model indicates that for one of our priority countries, Angola, we might avert 80,000 - 130,000 DALYs or 3,000 - 3,500 child deaths at scale.

COST-EFFECTIVENESS:

GiveWell’s modeled cost-effectiveness of $4,365 per child death averted for this intervention in India gives a good first indication of what is possible. Coverage gaps to close for essential vaccines like DTP-3 in many African countries where we plan to work are 4-6 times larger than in India. Our initial modeling indicates that achieving cost-effectiveness below $4,000 per child death averted is possible in this context, and this is our aim.

ROOM FOR MORE FUNDING IN 2023:

We are not currently fundraising but are always looking for volunteers interested in researching vaccinations and behavior change, implementing technology for mass-messaging systems, and supporting charity operations and strategy.
You can subscribe to updates and learn about future funding and support opportunities in our newsletter.