Rob Wiblin

She then did a master's in development management at LSE before working at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, the global health nonprofit called Options Consultancy Services, and the International Governance and Risk Institute.

But in 2019, though, she made a big career change and co-founded the nonprofit Savita, which aims to ensure that every child in India gets all of their basic vaccinations, which is what we're going to talk about today.

So thanks for coming on the podcast, Varsha.

I hope we'll get to talk about the challenges of scaling up a new health nonprofit and what you've learned from being a nonprofit founder.

But first, as always, what are you working on at the moment and why do you think it's important?

Yeah, nice.

Okay, well, we'll come back to Suvita in just a second.

But first off, maybe let's quickly zoom out and consider the kind of broader context of the problem that you're working on.

So basically, how many kids are going unvaccinated around the world?

And I guess how many end up dying as a result?

So at their first birthday, they haven't received any or most of the vaccinations?

Or is it just that 19 million haven't done the full schedule that's recommended?

Yeah, yeah.

And I guess, so you're saying a child dies every minute, so that's where you get kind of the 1.7 or 1.8 million people dying a year.

Are there harms other than death?

I'm guessing getting lots of these diseases might have long-term health consequences for people who are, you know, babies that even survive.

Yeah, I mean, I think the cost benefit analysis on vaccines almost always shows these wild ratios between the benefit and the cost.

And I guess the main questions that I've seen asked are like, well, how do we get more people to actually get these vaccines?

Because I guess all of the really low hanging fruit has been taken.

So where it's straightforward to get vaccines to kids, a lot of work has been done to do that.