Episode Details

I'm Svetha Janumpalli, founder and CEO of New Incentives. We run a conditional cash transfer program in northern Nigeria that provides small incentives to caregivers to complete routine infant vaccination schedules.

Today, we operate across over 7,000 clinics and have enrolled 6.8 million infants.

GiveWell's most recent analysis suggests our program is substantially more cost-effective than earlier estimates.

Our program currently costs roughly $16 per infant enrolled. During our RCT period, we averaged ~27,000 monthly cash transfers. In 2025, we averaged over 760,000 per month, a ~28× increase.

While we’re confident in the core results, there are still important open questions, particularly around long-term effects, scalability to new contexts, and how the model performs outside our current operating areas. We are interested in testing whether variations of the model can work in lower-density or differently constrained settings.

I’d love to answer your questions about what we’ve learned along the way, and I’m happy to engage on detailed or critical questions. We’ve learned a lot from mistakes and ongoing uncertainty. A few areas I'm especially happy to dig into:

• Operations and scale. What it takes to go from a small pilot to thousands of clinics in northern [...]

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First published:
May 6th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aqyGLEvmbCrwyNHvH/ama-svetha-janumpalli-ceo-and-founder-of-new-incentives

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.