Globally, 45 million children suffer from malnutrition, leading to 2.3 million child deaths annually. But even for those who live, the experience of malnutrition can have lifelong impacts on physical and cognitive health and social-emotional development. There is a consensus on how best to address extreme malnutrition: feeding kids a standard formula of peanut butter […]
Mental health disorders like depression and anxiety are common and significantly impact wellbeing, yet mental healthcare remains underfunded in low-income countries. Psychotherapy is an effective treatment that can be delivered cheaply by lay counsellors. This in-depth report evaluates the cost-effectiveness of two charities providing such therapy in Africa: Friendship Bench and StrongMinds. We estimate that […]
There can be toxic levels of lead in all sorts of surprising products, including cosmetics. Lead exposure causes a global health burden comparable to malaria and HIV but receives less than 0.1% of their funding – even though malaria and HIV are themselves neglected diseases. Reducing lead exposure also seems feasible, given the strong historical […]
Download report as PDF Summary At the , we evaluate the effect of interventions using subjective wellbeing (SWB) as our primary outcome. This is typically measured with questions asking people to self-report how happy or satisfied they are on a scale of 0 to 10. However, there is often too little ‘typical’ SWB […]
In November 2023, we published Version 3 of our psychotherapy analysis. This was a working report in which we estimated the effects of psychotherapy in low- and middle-income countries, as well as the cost-effectiveness of two psychotherapy charities: StrongMinds and Friendship Bench. In the first part of 2024, we have updated several parts of the […]
Dr Michael Plant conducted an in-person site visit to better understand the Friendship Bench programme and the people in it. We don’t expect site visits can, or should, be decisive for evaluation purposes (they are ‘anecdata’), but they can nevertheless be informative. Visitor: Dr Michael Plant, Founder & Research Director at the […]