Varsha Venugopal

We are talking to J-PAL colleagues on all of this and hope to get closer to the answers soon.

So just the idea that if a small number of ambassadors are responsible for the highest effect, are there ways we can directly reach them versus going through this whole nomination process?

Again, if we get closer to understanding the motivations of these ambassadors, maybe there are ways, maybe like you were asking, are they always leaders?

Maybe they're of a certain education, of a certain caste group.

anything else it could correlate to would help us then go, right, let's just go for... Narrow in on that.

Narrow in on that, exactly.

So through our SMS reminders program, we currently reach 350,000 parents across several states.

But the main new states we are enrolling from are Bihar and Maharashtra.

I mentioned this MOU we recently signed with the Maharashtra state government, which allows us to access and scale SMS reminders across the state.

We're also in discussions with the state immunization officer in Bihar to scale SMS reminders across two districts.

So while we reached 350,000 parents so far, we plan to reach another 150,000 over the next year.

With the ambassador program, the remote pilot that we conducted, we reached 5,000 eligible children, and we are hoping to double it by the end of this year.

We want to solve this problem of under immunization and drop off rate in India.

So we have six priority states which have more than 70% of the under immunized kids.

And we have a few plans on how to get there.

I think the default idea is that we would be running certain call centers and be able to reach at least across those six states and have a footprint.

But having said that, I think there may be some other endgame options we want to actively explore over the next few months.

One is we advise the governments themselves and they take on some of this work.

Or we partner with other institutions working closely with the government like WHO or UNICEF who are already based in state government offices.

Another idea is potentially identifying other non-profits within local contexts who understand the local area and can possibly quickly hire people or send out reminders and we train them.