Varsha Venugopal
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
mothers who haven't got high literacy and the kids dropping off vaccinations.
So the next iteration we are quite keen to introduce is voice recordings to see how they could further reinforce the messaging that's going through the text messages.
Yeah, no, we absolutely believe in making sure we look at the broad gamut of evidence that's available.
This is also the additional reason why we are quite keen on introducing the ambassador program along with the SMS reminders, because there seems like the effect sizes with the ambassadors is higher and we want to make sure we can capture some of that impact on the table.
Yeah, there is quite a fair degree of variation.
I mean, they're obviously in different regions to begin with, these text reminders.
Also, in terms of what the exact messaging itself is, is there a feedback loop on whether the child actually got the vaccine?
And then is the next reminder that's going out in any way connected to that, etc.?
So there was, for each of these studies, we had to apply some of these discounts based on how
similar they were to what we were planning to undertake and what that could mean in terms of the effect sizes of our intervention.
Right.
So right now at the margin, we estimate we can cover an additional village.
That's both SMS reminders and ambassadors for eligible parents at around $150 to $200.
And given each village has about 100 children due for vaccines.
So what that would mean is for $1,000, we would cover roughly six villages.
or 600 children.
So now taking into account the J-PAL study, which in the original paper suggested a 14 percentage point increase in uptake as a result of the ambassador program, we discounted to 10 percentage point increase.
We think by spending the additional $1,000 and reaching 600 children, we would be reaching an additional 60 children that will be immunized.
That sounds right.
Yeah.