We are excited to introduce four new charities launched through our August-October 2024 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program! This round saw our biggest grant to date, totaling an impressive $264K! We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the generous donors from the Seed Network Funding Circle, whose support has played a crucial role in bringing these organizations to life. We also appreciate the mentors in our network and all the talented applicants for their hard work in making these charities a reality.
This article provides a brief introduction to our new organizations. If you want to support some charities with further funding or are interested in volunteer opportunities, you will find more information in the sections below. If launching a high-impact charity interests you, please visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter.
We are excited to introduce our 2024 Fall Cohort:
ACTRA addresses crime in Latin America by implementing Community-Based Therapy (CBT) to enhance safety.
Rahi Impact focuses on improving labor migration processes to achieve better outcomes for migrant workers from South Asia to GCC countries.
Lead Research for Action (LeRA) researches lead exposure to safeguard more children from its harmful effects.
Oxygen Access Project works to improve the supply of medical oxygen, ultimately saving children's lives.
ACTRA
Co-founders: Laura Sofia Castro | Henning Peters
Website: https://www.actra.ngo/
Seed grant: $124,000
Background (why is this a problem worth solving?)
The Problem: Latin America has the highest crime rates in the world. In Colombia, the homicide rate is over four times the global average, with one in four people falling victim to crime yearly. Citizens in the region rate safety as their number one concern, even above unemployment.
The Gap: The “iron-fisted war on crime” is failing. Massive investments go into outdated, ineffective, and even harmful strategies. Only 3-10% of government programs are evidence-based.
The Solution: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) prevents chronic offending by shifting identities and promoting thoughtful decision-making.Evidence: Over 50 high-quality randomized studies show CBT reduces criminal relapse by 25-50%, theft by 54%, and homicide arrests by 65%. One CBT program even prevented 338 crimes per participant over a decade at ~$2 per crime averted. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and leading think tanks (J-PAL and IPA) all endorse CBT as highly promising, with IPA calling it a "best bet."
Near-term plans
Our mission is to implement and scale the most innovative and cost-effective solutions against violence and crime, with Colombia as our starting point. To our knowledge, ACTRA is the first organization attempting to scale CBT for at-risk populations across Latin America.
In 2025, we’ll develop and co-design an eight-week group therapy program with participants from our target population, making sure the program fits Colombia’s cultural and socio-economic context. We will pilot a full intervention in mid-2025 to refine logistics, outreach, and participant engagement. Afterward, we will conduct A/B tests and pilot RCTs to optimize and evaluate the program for scalability and cost-effectiveness.
Targets (estimated cost-effectiveness, one-year goals)
Cost-effectiveness at scale: Both AIM’s and our model converge in estimating CBT to be 13x-29x more effective than direct cash transfers, delivering benefits in health (33%), economic gains (32%), well-being (29%), and business productivity (6%). According to the IDB, CBT is also about seven times more cost-effective than the next best evidence-based security program, hot spot policing.
One-year goals: We aim to apply best practices in iterative learning to optimize the value per cost of our research and development efforts. Over the first year, we aim to have co-designed our program with potential participants, piloted the intervention, and built the implementation capacity to support further testing and refinement efforts.
How you can support
We are seeking connections with crime experts or local organizations working with at-risk populations in Colombia or Latin America. Please contact us directly before making introductions.
Rahi Impact
Co-founders: Anam Vadgama | Graham Tyler
Email: anam@rahiimpact.org | graham@rahiimpact.org
Website: TDB Seed grant: $117,000
Background (why is this a problem worth solving?)
India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh collectively send nearly 2.5 million workers abroad annually, primarily low- and mid-skilled workers migrating to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries on temporary contracts. Most migrants rely on networks of intermediaries to find job opportunities and navigate the migration process. Unfortunately, these intermediaries often charge exorbitant fees, exceeding $3,000 — equivalent to over 2.5 years of wages in the migrant’s home country — forcing many into debt. Fraudulent practices by some intermediaries drive a 28-34% migration failure rate, resulting in crippling financial losses.
Migrants lack access to reliable information, which perpetuates these challenges by leading to poor decisions and abuse. Even successful migrants face exploitation, particularly in GCC countries, where practices like passport withholding can trap workers in abusive conditions.
We envision a tech-first solution that reduces migration costs, failure rates, and safety risks for low- to mid-skill workers migrating from South Asia to GCC countries. Our scalable, cost-effective solution will provide critical information to support decision-making, connect users to vetted job opportunities, and provide personalized migration support.
Near-term plans
Our first-year goal is to deeply understand the end-to-end migration journey and identify automation opportunities. To gather insights, we’re currently prioritizing interviews with migrants, recruiters, employers, relevant NGOs, and experts. Anam recently visited Dubai to engage with these stakeholders firsthand. In January, we’ll conduct a scoping trip to our target migrant-sending country – either India or Bangladesh – to continue interviews and shadow potential migrants through the process. These learnings will guide the design of our pilot, which we expect to launch in May 2025.
Targets (estimated cost-effectiveness, one-year goals)
We plan to pilot direct migration assistance via WhatsApp and phone support, engaging ~300 low- to mid-skilled workers and facilitating ~45 successful migrations by October 2025. We expect to adjust these targets as we refine our intervention design through stakeholder interviews and scoping trips. This low-tech pilot will deepen our understanding of migrant needs and test different types of support, guiding the development of a scalable, cost-effective tech product in year two.
In the long term, our intervention is estimated to be 8 - 11x as cost-effective as direct cash transfers. Given that our intervention is relatively untested, we expect this estimate to evolve as we refine our design. We will also use this learning phase to critically evaluate our theory of change and pivot as required to maximize cost-effectiveness.
How you can support
We’re seeking introductions to employers of low- to mid-skilled migrant workers in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; recruitment agencies and manpower suppliers in India and Bangladesh; and NGOs working to improve labor migration for South Asian workers. We’re also seeking advisors with expertise in labor migration or experience building tech solutions for social impact in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Following our upcoming in-country visits in January and February, we’ll have a clearer sense of staff and volunteer needs.
Lead Research for Action (LeRA)
Co-founders: Isabel Arjmand | Tammy Tan
Website: www.leadresearch.org [not yet live]
Seed grant: $264,000
Background (why is this a problem worth solving?)
Lead exposure is a neglected health crisis, impacting 1 in 3 children worldwide. The Global Burden of Disease estimates that lead exposure causes more deaths each year than malaria and HIV/AIDS combined, yet it receives less than 1% as much funding. In addition to causing 1.5 million deaths annually, lead exposure impairs cognitive development, reducing lifetime earnings and accounting for up to one-fifth of the learning gap between high- and low-income countries.
In most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), we do not know what the main sources of lead exposure are. The list of likely culprits is long–metal cookware, cosmetics, spices, toys, paint, and more. Interest in eliminating lead has recently picked up, with over 25 countries signing onto the new Partnership for a Lead-Free Future. However, governments and NGOs cannot prioritize all possible sources of exposure. They need to know where to focus their attention, so studies to identify the primary sources of exposure in each country are needed.
Near-term plans
LeRA will conduct lead content studies on consumer products in LMICs to identify the main drivers of lead exposure in each country. We are also open to pursuing other types of research that target important knowledge gaps in lead exposure. Our work will enable the prioritization and elimination of major sources of lead exposure; we will provide decision-relevant data to governments and mitigation-focused NGOs to ensure regulation, reformulation, and enforcement.
Our work in each country will comprise three stages:
Engaging with governments and NGO partners
Conducting lead content studies to identify major sources of lead exposure
Sharing our research findings with partners who then take forward projects to eliminate identified exposure sources
The steps involved in running the lead content studies themselves are:
Targets (estimated cost-effectiveness, one-year goals)
We model LeRA’s cost-effectiveness over five years at approximately $20 per DALY-equivalent averted. This estimate is sensitive to uncertain parameters, including the likelihood of successfully eliminating a major source of exposure for each study we conduct and the number of years by which we speed up elimination.
In our first year, we aim to work in two countries, identifying sources of exposure in each and collaborating with other NGO partners who are well-placed to work towards elimination of identified sources. Over our first five years, we aim to create a rigorous, replicable playbook for conducting studies to identify lead exposure sources and to conduct these studies ourselves in twenty countries.
How you can support
Please get in touch by emailing us at hello@leadresearch.org.
Advice
As we launch LeRA, we aim to learn as much as possible. We would love to hear from people with experience in areas like conducting decision-relevant research that informs government action, especially in Africa, working in environmental health, or starting and scaling nonprofit organizations.
Funding
We’re very grateful that Ambitious Impact’s network of seed funders has provided funding for our first year of operations. If our initial work is promising, we expect to seek funding for our second year in the first half of 2025. We’d love to connect with potential funders interested in learning more.
Staying in touch
We plan to create a newsletter. If you’d like to keep up with our work as it progresses, please sign up here!
Oxygen Access Project
Co-founders: Leonie Falk
Website: Under development
Seed grant: $142,000
Background (why is this a problem worth solving?)
Every year, 7 million children in low and middle-income countries are
admitted to hospitals in need of medical oxygen therapy for pneumonia alone. In
most low-income contexts, 4 out of 5 of those children will not receive the
oxygen they need.
Near-term plans
We will spend the first few months scoping out potential locations for a pilot program. Nigeria, India, and Pakistan scored high on our geographic analysis. We plan to conduct one of these country visits before the end of the year.
In the first year, we plan to improve access to medical oxygen in 4-8 hospitals with the capacity to provide oxygen to 4,500 children. With this pilot program, we aim to avert 30 deaths.
Targets (estimated cost-effectiveness, one-year goals)
Our estimated cost-effectiveness predicts that this intervention will avert one DALY for $40-$70 and save a child's life for $2500. Our charity aims to avert the death of 30 children within its first year and 5000 over the next five years.
We are particularly excited about the strong evidence base for this intervention and hope to replicate the results found in previous projects in underserved locations.
How you can support
We would be grateful for any introductions to existing organizations in the oxygen access space.