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Varsha Venugopal

👤 Person
886 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

And that's the kind of thing you don't get in an RCT.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So that's something we want to go there and interrogate further.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

That's a good question.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

And honestly, we do not know.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

In the study itself, there was some most enthusiastic people in the J-PAL research, which put up posters and they deliberately removed them from their study to ensure they could focus on the intrinsic gossip element.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Exactly.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So it seems something about this intrinsic motivation ambassadors by just being influencers

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

are able to take on that role.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

How they actually share that information is not something we have figured out yet, except that they seem to be able to do it.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Somewhere between 3% and 7%.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Yeah.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Yeah, so we know SMS reminders, you're absolutely right, are easier to scale up.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

In fact, in one of the two states we work in, Maharashtra, we already have a memorandum of understanding with the state government, which allows us to rapidly scale up across the state.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

Having said that, we are quite aware that it's the Ambassador Program, which seems to be having some of these large effect sizes, and we're really excited to overlay it on top of the SMS Reminders Program.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

With that in mind, we are now introducing Ambassador Program in Maharashtra, we hope.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

And in the other state, Bihar, we have already completed this pilot and we just this week have also started exploring an additional district, Patna.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

I think for us, the fact that we've already moved to a remote version makes it much cheaper than the original version.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So that's one.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So the fact that we are now calling up these people makes the overall cost effectiveness higher, we would think, depending on what the actual impact is.

80,000 Hours Podcast
#113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India

So the big focus for us is to make the ambassadors as scalable as possible.