Writing ~10 months later and the unit costs are ~7x lower than when I wrote the above. See here. I'm hopeful that we can continue to cut costs with greater scale!
Nigeria was selected in part because it's one of the most promising places for this training to deliver impact. We've identified more than a dozen other countries that have low rates of early initiation of breastfeeding, with a population of health workers > 1 million in just those countries.
You can get a sense yourself of the number of health workers in Africa in Table 1 of this WHO report. Our initial digging reveals some promising countries for our intervention outside of Africa as well. Our sheets related to this are not super polished, but we're confident the ceiling is pretty high - we hope to be training > 1 million health workers every year when we're operating at scale.
Our analysis above is focused on one particular practice, but our course(s) can be re-configured fairly easily to focus on different practices in different contexts. If a country has great adherence to early initiation of breastfeeding, there may still be a strong case for us hosting a course there that instead focuses on whichever is the next most promising thing.
Some of these other clinical practices might have different impacts than EIBF, but low unit costs at scale should make a lot of other interventions look good in a CEA, too. Our course-completer cost in the CEA was ~$14, but we expect that may come down a lot as we scale up 🤞.
Writing ~10 months later and the unit costs are ~7x lower than when I wrote the above. See here. I'm hopeful that we can continue to cut costs with greater scale!
Thanks for the question.
Nigeria was selected in part because it's one of the most promising places for this training to deliver impact. We've identified more than a dozen other countries that have low rates of early initiation of breastfeeding, with a population of health workers > 1 million in just those countries.
You can get a sense yourself of the number of health workers in Africa in Table 1 of this WHO report. Our initial digging reveals some promising countries for our intervention outside of Africa as well. Our sheets related to this are not super polished, but we're confident the ceiling is pretty high - we hope to be training > 1 million health workers every year when we're operating at scale.
Our analysis above is focused on one particular practice, but our course(s) can be re-configured fairly easily to focus on different practices in different contexts. If a country has great adherence to early initiation of breastfeeding, there may still be a strong case for us hosting a course there that instead focuses on whichever is the next most promising thing.
Some of these other clinical practices might have different impacts than EIBF, but low unit costs at scale should make a lot of other interventions look good in a CEA, too. Our course-completer cost in the CEA was ~$14, but we expect that may come down a lot as we scale up 🤞.