Episode Details

“Spiro: an update 2.5 years on and a fundraising ask for expansion” by Habiba Banu

Published 3 weeks, 6 days ago

Description

Summary

Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first 198 thousand dollars. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.

The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well and GiveWell made us a grant last year. Now there's an urgent opportunity in front of us: US funding for community TB contact tracing across half of Sindh province in Pakistan ends this month. The provincial government has invited us to expand our work - taking on those 15 districts and expanding to cover all 30 districts of Sindh, up from the 7 we serve today. To do that we're aiming to raise 512 thousand dollars by the end of July, the most urgent slice of a ~1.8 million dollars gap for 2026–2027. By our own modelling, our work is in the ballpark of something that would meet GiveWell's bar - around $5,000 per life saved. But if we want to avoid a gap in coverage on the ground after the US pulls out, we’ll need to [...]

---

Outline:

(00:13) Summary

(01:55) What Spiro does

(03:35) Progress since our launch

(05:14) The next opportunity: all of Sindh

(06:22) We're fundraising for an urgent $512k now

(08:01) Risk and uncertainties

(09:37) How to give

(10:07) The future for Spiro

(10:27) Appendix: More on what we've done since Spiro's launch

---