Varsha Venugopal

or approaching other institutions to take on some of that role.

So I think there is some fundamental difference in how this is viewed by funders.

I think even within EA, there are different ways I see that organizations have progressed.

You have the AMF model, which is 10 staff,

And I see their key role or key capabilities around raising funds and identifying local partners on the ground who are highly credible and then setting up extensive, rigorous M&E systems to monitor how they're performing.

But by themselves, they're a fairly small team.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have an organization like New Incentives,

which is a hundred plus team across Northwest Nigeria, operationally rolling out conditional cash transfers by themselves.

So a big question for us is where do we land in that spectrum and how should we be progressing?

And some of that takes a lot of experimentation and iteration over time.

And what that means is it's a term I've heard some of our colleagues mention, this value of deaths timeframe, where we are not exactly the new shiny innovators

innovative startup on the block, but we are not the organization that has it all figured out and are ready to scale.

We're kind of somewhere in the middle.

So trying to find funders who are okay with that level of uncertainty and buy into the idea of experimentation for a while longer.

It makes perfect sense in an ideal world.

The governments should be taking this on.

The challenge is that the reason nonprofits such as ours exist is because of some kind of market failure or government failure.

So at the moment, the government is not taking it on to a level of rigor we would like.

and therefore we exist.

Having said that, in an ideal scenario, we would want the governments to take it on in the long run, which is why we are working very closely with them, also so we can identify other opportunities to support them and find ways to build their technical capacity to take this on in the long run.