Varsha Venugopal

Possibly.

I think it just comes down to risk tolerance.

And I think even within the EA community, there are certain individuals and organizations.

For instance, Founders Pledge has been involved in funding us because they think we could be as cost effective or more cost effective than the top GiveWell charities, even though we may not be there yet.

Having said that, yes, I think there is possibly less risk tolerance for some of the larger funders who would rather have us there already.

before they choose to fund us.

Well, another challenge is our continued focus on M&E.

So when I worked in my previous organizations, the World Bank and Soros Foundation, we had strong M&E processes in place.

That's monitoring and evaluation.

Yes, monitoring and evaluation and focus on better understanding how our programs are running and what's the impact.

Having said that, when I came across effective altruism and its tenets, the whole idea of using rigorous evidence as a starting point to determine which interventions to focus on was quite novel and exciting and was part of the rationale for convincing me to move into this area.

So RCTs as a starting point for choosing interventions makes a lot of sense and clearly something we're bought into.

The other bit is then figuring out when we should roll out a randomized trial for our program itself and what that could mean.

So at the moment, given we have this large scale, high quality randomized trial that's just been released, we think we can kind of ride on its coattails for a while longer.

But the next challenge for us would be within the next five years, figuring out how we can set up and implement a randomized trial.

I guess an ongoing debate for us and just something to be aware of is within the broader community, we have seen organizations, funders backing off because the randomized trials produce mixed results.

And some of it is a lot to do with

just communicating the results and understanding the nuance of the results, which sometimes gets lost and is seen as right.

The program had null effects, so whatever they're doing is not impactful.

And so we are very cognizant that at an early stage, we don't want to get kind of stuck in that trajectory and want to have additional confidence in our own dimensions before we choose to run our own randomized trial.