Varsha Venugopal

speaker

886 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2021 last heard Oct 2021

Varsha Venugopal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #113 – Varsha Venugopal on using gossip to help vaccinate every child in India · 18 Oct 2021 podcast

Luckily, we know it already starts off scalable, maybe not as much as SMS reminders.

It's fairly light touch.

It's just about identifying these right influencers.

There is no component of training involved.

It's

more about tapping into these existing social networks and influencers who seem to have a natural tendency to spread this information.

So yes, while SMS reminders are more mature and faster to scale up, we are waiting to get to that same point with ambassadors so we could scale them up together.

Exactly.

So it is not that far from a scalable model, but still compared to SMS.

So let me just, I guess, quickly go over the process involved with SMS, because even with that, it's a fairly different model in the two states we work in and has obviously different impacts on cost effectiveness.

The first step is data collection.

So in the case of Bihar, we have a couple of team members, Ram and Ravi, who actually visit the primary health centers and under this government partnership, collect the relevant data from birth registers.

These have already been recorded on paper by the clinician with consent of family and the data is encrypted at this point of collection.

So then once they have this data, they digitize it from paper birth records for our database.

And then the final step is this data processing, which is this downstream process where the data is sent out as personalized reminders.

And we use a third party scheduling software which connects through an API to our bulk SMS provider.

So what this means is in the case of Bihar, while it sounds like it's an easily scalable model, there is an element of surveyors actually having to visit this primary health centers and collecting the data.

Compared to that in Maharashtra state, because we have this MOU with the state government, we pretty much missed the first two steps and directly go to the third step.

We just directly get this reproductive child health data from the state governments and can roll out the messages across the district.

So obviously that has implications on the cost effectiveness of both models.

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