Varsha Venugopal

And focusing on this impact, neglectedness, tractability framework was very compelling.

So I went to the conference, met a bunch of people, did some more research, and as a result, went through this charity incubation program in 2019.

And following that, I founded this nonprofit along with my co-founder, Fiona.

So I can run you through the steps that Charity Entrepreneurship took.

if that's useful at this point, to get to the point of identifying some of the top intervention areas, which we then took on to further research and zone in on the intervention we focused on.

Yeah, so I was already working in development for more than a decade when I came across effective altruism.

So I guess for me, the pivot was more about maybe slightly getting disillusioned with the areas of work I was engaging in, which was fiscal decentralization and oil, gas mining and development, which had complex theories of change.

And it was harder to focus on attribution and impact.

And having come across effective altruism and some of its precepts, this idea of simpler theories of change and focus on impact was very compelling.

So I went through a charity entrepreneurship incubation, which brings together others similarly interested and has a rigorous process of identifying potential entrepreneurs.

What Charity Entrepreneurship does is it starts by looking at some of the recommendations of GiveWell and the World Health Organization and Copenhagen Consensus, and then does some shallow research based on several criteria, including cost effectiveness, scalability, etc.

And additionally, looks into the ITN framework impact factors.

Exactly.

And where they had landed was unconditional cash transfers.

So Fiona happened to also be in the same incubation program.

They also go through a process of trying to match different entrepreneurs to each other.

And it turned out we were a good match.

So both of us started by looking at conditional cash transfers for immunization.

So conditional cash transfers was something they had already looked at.

And we selected immunization based on, of course, the quality of evidence.