Varsha Venugopal

There was external and internal validity of research and validation from experts through interviews.

And in terms of India, I guess we were veering towards India for various reasons.

There was a case to be made around scalability.

There was also my own personal and professional networks there.

So we started by looking at interventions that could potentially beat conditional cash transfers in terms of cost effectiveness.

And that's when we came across this large scale randomized trial run by the Poverty Action Lab, which was doing exactly that.

So quickly about this trial, it was run in the state of Haryana and they were looking at across seven districts.

It was led by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and others.

And what they were specifically looking into was different combinations of policy tools that could have the most impact on improving uptake of routine immunization.

So the three policy tools they were looking at were mobile credit directly to parents and carers, and again, different amounts and increasing at different levels, SMS reminders directly to parents and carers, and this gossip, this idea of finding influencers.

And what they found through this study was that the combination of SMS reminders and ambassadors was the most cost effective.

Adding local ambassadors and text messages to the government's routine immunization programs

increased the number of fully immunized children per dollar spent by 9.1%.

So we found that extremely exciting.

This is percent.

So in terms of the actual increase in percentage points, we know for the ambassador program, it is 10 percentage point increase.

And then we did additional research on the SMS reminders and looked into some meta analysis to reach our own conclusions on that separately.

Yeah, exactly.

Which was quite exciting and interesting for us.

This wasn't there in the draft papers we were looking at initially, but then the actual paper just came out a few months ago.