The promise of ACTRA: Preventing crime with cognitive behavioural therapy
ACTRA is a charity delivering CBT to prevent crime in Latin America (starting in Colombia). It uses a model similar to NEPI, a charity that combines cash transfers and CBT to prevent crime in Liberia. Thereby, we do a prediction of ACTRA’s potential cost-effectiveness by adjusting our model for NEPI. Only using the CBT component reduces the effectiveness of the intervention, but reduces the costs much more, leading to a higher cost-effectiveness. We predict that ACTRA could have a cost-effectiveness of 37 WELLBYs created per $1,000 donated (or a cost of $27 to produce a WELLBY).
Important Update
We mention the charity NEPI in this report. Since September 11th 2025, the Happier Lives Institute is no longer recommending NEPI, the NY non-profit organisation that works in Liberia, as the organisation has discontinued operations and is in the process of dissolving, due to the discovery of financial irregularities. This does NOT change our prediction about ACTRA.
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Summary
ACTRA is a charity delivering CBT to prevent crime in Latin America (starting in Colombia). It uses a model similar to NEPI, a charity that combines cash transfers and CBT to prevent crime in Liberia. We evaluated and recommended NEPI as a ‘promising charity’ in 2024.
The key difference between NEPI and ACTRA is that ACTRA does not use cash transfers, instead only using the CBT component.
ACTRA is too new to have sufficient data for an evaluation. Thereby, we do a prediction of ACTRA’s potential cost-effectiveness – once it reaches the same scale as NEPI, which could be in a few years – by adjusting our model for NEPI. Only using the CBT component reduces the effectiveness of the intervention, but reduces the costs much more, leading to a higher cost-effectiveness.
We predict that ACTRA could have a cost-effectiveness of 37 WELLBYs created per $1,000 donated (or a cost of $27 to produce a WELLBY), which would be more cost-effective than our current cost-effectiveness estimate for NEPI of 22 WELLBYs created per $1,000 donated (McGuire et al., 2024f).
This higher cost-effectiveness is driven by two factors related to dropping the cash component:
Decreases the effectiveness by much less 13.6 → 12.1 WELLBYS (11% reduction)
But decreases the cost much more: $630 → $330 per person (48% reduction).
We also think that the ACTRA theory of change, characteristics of the ACTRA team, and their eye towards cost-effectiveness are reassuring. Critically, they have a credible plan for generating high quality evidence of how well their programme works in practice.
This reasoning provides the basis of giving ACTRA an ‘honorable mention’, a new evaluation category below our existing two categories of ‘top charity’ and ‘promising charity’. Honourable mentions are special cases that we think are likely cost-effective, but we don’t have sufficient material to make a recommendation like our promising or top recommendation.
We think that ACTRA is potentially worth consideration by donors interested in more “hits based” approaches (i.e., less risk averse). At time of writing, they have a funding gap for 2025-2026 of around $500,000.
Our recommendations change over time as we produce new research, stay updated by consulting our website.
Notes and acknowledgements
Author note: Joel McGuire contributed to the conceptualisation, investigation, analysis, data curation, and writing of the project. Samuel Dupret contributed to the investigation, analysis, and writing of the project. Michael Plant contributed to the writing of the project.
The views expressed in this document do not necessarily reflect the perspectives of reviewers or employees of the evaluated charities.
Charity information note: We thank Laura Castro (co-founder) for providing us with information about ACTRA.