Applications are now open for AIM's Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in 2025, with the next round taking place in February 2025. This program provides two months of intensive training in starting a non-profit, as well as co-founder matching, seed funding access, and recommended charity ideas.
This article provides an overview of our latest recommended charity ideas, which will be available to participants in the February 2025 cohort. We will publish full research reports for each recommended idea in the coming weeks.
Recommended Charity Ideas: One Paragraph Summary
Cage-Free Farming in the Middle East
We want to see a new organization implement the most successful and well-tested intervention of the animal movement – cage-free corporate campaigns – in a new, neglected region such as the Middle East, which farms over 300 million hens every year. Cage-free campaigns are the backbone of the existing animal advocacy movement, with great progress being made on the global level, as we have seen 2,625 cage-free commitments made so far. 1,157 of these corporate pledges are now fully implemented across Europe, the UK, and the US, impacting 220 million hens. However, despite this global progress, there are still many countries without existing organizations or ongoing campaigns where layer hens are still suffering in the extreme confinement of battery or furnished cages. We can change that. We have already seen progress being made in the region by Kafessiz Türkiye in Türkiye. We think focusing on the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt could be particularly promising for a new organization as there are currently no existing organizations working here.
Reducing Keel Bone Fractures
Keel bone fractures (KBF) are the most important welfare concern in cage-free laying hens. They are caused by their unnaturally high egg-laying demand, lack of space to exercise, and freedom from cages, creating more opportunities for collisions and injuries on farms without appropriate stockmanship and management. We want to see a new organization work in countries that have made the most cage-free progress – particularly Germany, the UK, and the US – to help reduce the prevalence of KBF. We are most excited about this being done through work with certifiers to set targets for KBF prevalence on their farms. For example, Global Animal Partnership Steps 5 and 5+ require KBF prevalence to be at or below 25% on these farms. We think this new organization should first work with certifiers but then consider a pivot to focus on corporate campaigns (or policy) in the medium-to-long term, as these campaigns are more scalable and generally have a stronger evidence base than those with certifiers.
East Asian Fish Welfare
We continue to recommend a new organization working on fish welfare in neglected countries. We first recommended this idea in October 2022. Since then, we have updated the location and species considerations to make them more open (moving from focusing specifically on milkfish in the Philippines to including other species, such as tilapia, in other countries such as Indonesia and Taiwan). The scale of fish suffering is huge. A staggering 78 to 171 billion individual fish are slaughtered each year, and we still do not yet have an obvious, tested, and scalable ask and approach to improving fish welfare. This is particularly concerning in informal economies where we cannot borrow tactics from previously successful campaigns of the animal movement, such as cage-free corporate campaigning. Informal economies are very common in Asia, where roughly 90% of the global tonnage of farmed fish is produced. We think a new organization working to try and answer these difficult questions will be a big value add to the animal welfare movement.
Digital Pulmonary Rehabilitation
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a serious global health problem, affecting 212 million people. COPD causes 3.3 million deaths and the loss of 74.4 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) – most of which are in LMICs. Symptoms such as chronic cough, shortness of breath, frequent respiratory infections, and chest tightness significantly affect quality of life. While COPD is not curable, the symptoms can be managed and alleviated. Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is a low-cost and well-evidenced program that improves the health outcomes of COPD patients. However, access to pulmonary rehabilitation is extremely low, especially in LMICs where physiotherapist capacity is low and clinics are located far away. In 2015, PR was available to only 2.7% of people with chronic lung diseases globally. There is moderately strong evidence that PR can be effective even when provided digitally. With rising access to smartphones, even amongst elderly populations, we think an organization that can scale digital pulmonary rehabilitation would be highly cost-effective and make an enormous impact. We have engaged positively with an NHS-approved digital pulmonary rehabilitation company, and the organization would likely work with a new charity to scale its technology in LMICs.
Lead Research
This idea has been brought forward into the August 2024 Incubation Program. As such, we do not expect it to be available to founders in the February 2025 cohort.
Lead poisoning is a large-scale problem affecting populations around the world. It is estimated that one in three children worldwide have dangerously high levels of lead in their blood, most of them living in LMICs. This disrupts their cognitive development and affects cardiovascular health, causing an estimated $300-500 billion in lost productivity and between 1 and 5 million deaths each year. While there is growing momentum to tackle the problem, many organizations and governments are constrained by a lack of good-quality data documenting where and from what sources people are exposed to lead. Therefore, the idea for this organization is to focus on research and data collection to close these knowledge gaps, thus enabling the design of effective mitigation strategies. Depending on the plans and abilities of other actors in this space, this new organization may then itself work on the implementation of those strategies. While somewhat unusual, this focus on research activities has been identified as particularly neglected, with experts and existing actors supporting the existence of a new charity in this space.
CBT to Prevent Crime
Crime has a substantial cost to society at the individual, community, and national levels. Homicide, rape, assault, theft, and robberies are just a few categories of crime. Each year, over 176,000 homicides occur among youth aged 15-29, the third leading cause of death for this age group. In addition to the direct losses to victims, the negative externalities of crime are wide-reaching. To list just a few, high crime rates cause lower economic activity, lower subjective well-being, the loss of productivity from incarcerated individuals, and losses to society in terms of preventive costs (including security apparatus, policing, and judiciary system). There is emerging evidence that CBT is highly effective at reducing non-organised crime in high-risk young men. A recent RCT in Liberia evaluated by IPA found strong effects ten years post-intervention, suggesting long-lasting reductions in crime (summary here). We think an organization that replicates this model would be highly cost-effective.
A Direct Delivery Global Health Intervention (to be decided)
We plan to add one additional direct delivery global health intervention for the next cohort. We are looking into several promising options within global health. These include revisiting various options for improving oxygen access for childhood pneumonia and investigating improving access to Penicillin for preventing congenital syphilis. There could also be a direct delivery idea that carries over if not all ideas are founded through the August 2024 Incubation Program cohort, such as Ceramic filters for improving water quality or Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) groups for maternal and newborn health.
Excited to learn more? Sign up to our newsletter to be notified when our reports are published and attend our webinar where we will hold a Q&A on the research behind these recommendations.
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