Get an infant every vaccine on the schedule.
Small cash payments to caregivers in northern Nigeria, handed over at the clinic, for each routine vaccination visit an infant completes.
Choose your ripple
Every.org passes your gift to New Incentives and sends the receipt; it suggests a tip you can set to zero. Or give on newincentives.org.
The routine vaccines a child gets in the first year, against measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, pneumonia and more, are among the cheapest ways ever found to stop a child dying before five. Millions of infants still miss them, and rarely for lack of vaccine. The clinic is far, the trip costs money, and the full schedule needs several visits. Northern Nigeria has some of the lowest coverage in the world.
- Immunization coverageWorld Health OrganizationHow many children get the routine schedule, and how many are still missed.
- VaccinationOur World in DataCoverage by vaccine and country, and how many deaths vaccines prevent.
- Vaccines and immunizationWorld Health OrganizationWHO's programme page: what the routine schedule is and how many children miss it.
The figures
The same figure, across GiveWell's picks
- Child Survival$3,500
- Malaria Medicine$4,000
- Childhood Vaccines$4,500
- Malaria Nets$5,500
Lower is cheaper per life saved. All of them sit far inside GiveWell's funding bar; the spread between them is small next to the spread between any of them and an unevaluated charity.
What New Incentives does
New Incentives pays caregivers in northern Nigeria a small cash incentive, about a dollar a visit, each time they bring an infant to a government clinic for a routine vaccination. The vaccines themselves are free. The money covers the trip and the day's lost earnings, and clinic staff explain why the full schedule matters.
How GiveWell gets there
The program was tested in an independent randomised controlled trial from 2017 to 2020, which found large increases in vaccination rates. GiveWell then models how many deaths those extra vaccinations avert, using its own estimates of disease burden and vaccine efficacy in each state, and discounts for the children who would have been vaccinated anyway.
What could be wrong
- Cost per life saved spans about a fourfold range across the states the program runs in. The average hides that spread.
- The trial measured vaccination rates, not deaths. The life-saved figure rests on GiveWell's model of what those vaccinations prevent, which is well grounded but still a model.
- Cash incentives change behaviour while they are paid. Whether vaccination habits persist after a program leaves an area is less certain, and GiveWell's estimate does not assume they do.
- This is the fourth GiveWell Top Charity on this site. The four are close in cost per life saved; the choice between them is which problem you want your money on, not which is cheaper.
Every figure is an average program cost, not a receipt. How we phrase things.