Living Goods

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Published: November 2014

Since publishing this review, we have a mid-2016 update on Living Goods and notes from our conversations with Living Goods in May 2017 and June 2018. In September 2016, the authors of the randomized-controlled trial of Living Goods program posted a discussion paper on the study (archived version).

Summary

What do they do? Living Goods runs a network of Community Health Promoters (CHPs) who sell health and household goods door-to-door in their communities in Uganda and Kenya and provide basic health counseling. Living Goods also provides consulting and funding to BRAC to run a similar network in Uganda and to other organizations to run similar networks in other locations.

Does it work? The main evidence for Living Goods’ impact is a randomized controlled trial that found that the program caused a 27% reduction in under-5 mortality. The full details of this study are not yet publicly available. We have some questions about this study that we cannot yet discuss because the authors are in the process of submitting the final report for publication. We plan to publish a review of the study once the authors have published the full report. Living Goods collects ongoing monitoring data on various aspects of its programs; we have limited confidence in the quality of this data, which raises questions about our ability to learn about the impact of future work. We do not know how effective Living Goods’ work with its partners has been.

What do you get for your dollar? We estimate that Living Goods' cost per life saved will be roughly $10,000 in 2014-2016. Making assumptions that we would guess are particularly optimistic about Living Goods, we estimate the cost per life saved at about $4,400. Pessimistic assumptions lead to an estimate of about $37,000 per life saved.

Is there room for more funding? Living Goods is seeking about $10 million per year for the next 4 years to scale up its program in Uganda five fold, up from $3.3 million raised in 2013. It is currently in discussions with a number of its core funders who have expressed interest in backing the scale up. No funds have been committed at this stage. If all proposals to core funders are successful, Living Goods will have a gap of approximately $2 to 3 million per year. Living Goods is also seeking additional funding to co-fund partners to start networks in other countries.

Living Goods is a standout because of its:

• Randomized-controlled trial, which found that Living Goods' program reduced child mortality by a very large amount.
• Standout transparency - it has shared significant, detailed information about its programs with us.

Major unresolved issues include:

• The main evidence for Living Goods' program is a single RCT, whereas other programs we recommend are generally supported by multiple sources of evidence. We have a number of potential concerns about Living Goods' RCT.
• As a result of our limited confidence in how the Living Goods and BRAC programs are monitored, we do not know how much we will be able to learn about the success of the programs in the future.
• The size of Living Goods' funding gap for the next year is highly uncertain because major funders are considering supporting the program. If Living Goods raises enough funds to scale up the program studied with the RCT, it may allocate additional funds to programs with less of a track record.

Our review process

We first considered Living Goods in 2009 and noted that it stood out for subjecting its program to a rigorous evaluation. In 2012, we spoke with Living Goods to get an update on its work and its randomized controlled trial (RCT; conversation notes). Living Goods told us at that time that the results from the RCT were not going to be reliable due to spillover of the intervention into control locations and incorrect matching of the treatment area and the treatment survey area – issues that reduce the statistical power of the study.1

In 2014, Living Goods informed us that the results of the RCT were available and that the effect on mortality was large enough to overcome the problems with statistical power. This year, in order to publish an interim review of Living Goods, we spoke with Living Goods twice (notes from May 2014 here and forthcoming for July 2014) and reviewed documents that it sent us in response to our questions about the RCT, financial statements and budgets, product offerings and sales records, metrics reports, accuracy checks on CHP reports, CHP selection process, CHP dropout rates and profitability, and program performance.

Since finalizing our interim review and determining that Living Goods was a contender for a recommendation, we met with Living Goods in October 2014, requested additional documents, conducted a site visit to Living Goods' program in Uganda in October 2014 (see notes and photos), and spoke once more with Living Goods in November 2014. We incorporated what we learned from discussions, documents, and the site visit into this review.

Previous versions of this page:

• October 2012
• October 2014

What do they do?

Living Goods has two main activities:

1. Running a network of agents who sell health and other products door-to-door in Uganda and Kenya and who provide some basic health services.
2. Consulting with other organizations on issues related to running similar agent-based systems in Uganda and other locations and funding some of these projects.

We discuss each of these more below.

Running a network of Community Health Promoters

Living Goods describes its network of agents as follows:2

Recruiting and training

Living Goods recruits new CHPs through referrals from existing CHPs, community groups, other NGOs, and religious and local leaders.3 Criteria for new CHPs include: ability to spend two hours per day on CHP activities, 25-45 years old with 7 or more years of schooling, active in her community, fluent in local language and able to read and communicate in basic English.4 Candidates are asked to complete an interview to test their communication skills and engagement,5 attend a two week training course in health and business, and pass a test at the end of the course.

Training covers diagnosis, treatment, and recognizing danger signs that require referral to health facilities, as well as business and sales skills.6 After a CHP passes training, she spends her first two weeks conducting a census of all of the households in her designated area and collecting phone numbers and other key information.7 During this census, CHPs note which households have children under-5 and pregnant women.8

Those who pass the test are required to invest about $30 in initial supplies; Living Goods offers 6-month loans to cover part of the investment.9 Living Goods provides CHPs with a “business-in-a-bag,” which includes uniforms and promotional materials, and a phone.10 Living Goods also provides ongoing in-service training for CHPs.11

Living Goods told us that it interviews about five applicants for every applicant that advances to the training course and that about 5-10% of trainees do not pass the test at the end of the training course.12

Products

In Uganda, CHPs sell preventative health goods (fortified foods, mosquito nets, malaria prophylaxis, vitamins and minerals), treatments (malaria treatments, ORS and zinc, antibiotics, deworming pills, medicines for pain, coughing, and colds), reproductive health goods (delivery kits, menstrual pads, contraceptives), hygiene goods (soap, diapers, toothpaste, toilet paper), and household goods that Living Goods has selected because, in Living Goods’ words, they “have a proven economic benefit and may contribute to improved health” (cookstoves, solar lighting and power, water treatment), among other products.13 CHPs are expected to have medicines for diarrhea (ORS), pneumonia (amoxicillin), and malaria (ACTs) in stock at all times.14

The sales data Living Goods has shared with us is sales to CHPs, from Living Goods branches, rather than sales by CHPs to clients.15 Living Goods notes that both types of products offered and margins can change quickly16 – margins given are from July 2014 and may not reflect long-term trends. It is our understanding that "CHP margins" in the table below are those set by Living Goods; we don't know if they are followed in practice. Living Goods told us that it strongly discourages CHPs from selling at prices other than those set by Living Goods and that CHPs typically follow the price guidelines.17

Sales by product in Uganda between January 2011 and August 2014 (quantities/size per unit vary)18

Living Goods’ program in Kenya is newer,19 smaller, and offers fewer products. CHPs in Kenya do not currently offer treatments, which are key to Living Goods’ goal of reducing child mortality. They do offer mosquito nets, fortified foods, contraceptives, and delivery kits, though these account for a small portion of sales to date. Living Goods told us that its current focus in Kenya is on selling “durables that deliver proven economic impact” such as high-efficiency cookstoves and solar lights.20

Sales by product in Kenya between July 2013 and July 201421

Health services

In addition to going door-to-door selling products, CHPs are asked to:

• Provide households with advice on topics including nutrition, family planning, hygiene, and use of preventative tools such as bed nets, water treatment, clean stoves, and solar lights.22
• Evaluate the health of children in the household and diagnose illnesses, using the Integrated Community Case Management (ICCM) system.23
• Conduct follow-ups with children they have treated and, if necessary, refer the children to other healthcare providers.24
• Give their phone number to clients and respond to calls when asked to provide treatment.25
• Track pregnancies and make 2-3 visits during pregnancy to provide education and vitamins, check for risk factors, sell delivery kits, and encourage women to use health facilities for antenatal and delivery care. CHPs receive small financial incentives for registering pregnancies and making pre- and post-natal visits.26
• Visit mothers shortly after they give birth and once more in the first week to “ensure proper newborn care practices.”27
• Hold community events to provide health education, at least twice per month.28

Oversight

CHPs are overseen by Branch Managers. Branch Managers are expected to visit or talk to each CHP at least once per month29 and collect data from CHPs on pregnancy registrations, treatments provided to children under 5, and other activities.30 Living Goods told us that during their field visits with CHPs, Branch Managers are expected to evaluate CHPs on several criteria:31

• Appearance: for example, checking that CHPs have a sign on their home indicating that they work for Living Goods and that they are wearing their uniform.
• Inventory: checking that CHPs have a sufficient amount of key treatments.
• Health knowledge: evaluating CHPs’ competency in diagnosing key illnesses and providing antenatal and postnatal care.
• Product knowledge: evaluating CHPs’ knowledge of key benefits of products.
• Selling skills.

We do not have a strong sense of the quality of Branch Managers’ evaluations of CHPs, and we have not seen documentation to support that Branch Managers carry out these evaluations once per month with all CHPs as planned.

Based on these reports and sales records, Branch Managers are asked to rank CHPs, occasionally give bonuses to top performers, provide coaching to medium and low performers, and dismiss the lowest performers.32 Criteria for high performance includes over $63 of product purchases, 7 or more registered pregnancies, 13 or more malaria treatments and 6 or more diarrhea treatments per month.33

Field Supervisors are responsible for supervising Branch Staff and monitoring the performance of Living Goods branches. They are expected to be in touch with branch management daily and visit branches frequently to answer questions, listen to challenges, and help find solutions to problems. Living Goods looks for Field Supervisors that have backgrounds in sales, health education, and community outreach.34

Planned smartphone system

In the future, Living Goods plans to require all of its CHPs to use Android-based smartphones during visits with customers.35

This system will:

• Allow CHPs to keep electronic records of their customers and their past activities.36
• Assist CHPs with accurate diagnosis and treatment by prompting them with questions for the patient and then providing a diagnosis and treatment recommendation based on the answers.37
• Enable branches to collect data on CHPs’ sales and treatment activities in real time and linked to GPS coordinates.38

Living Goods has begun using its smartphone system in four of its eight branches, training 100% of the agents from three of them on the Android platform in October 2014 (as of this writing), with plans to move the rest to the system in the coming months.39

Living Goods told us that it expects this new smartphone system to reduce its costs of data collection and provide better monitoring and customer data, as well as make it easier for Living Goods to follow up and spot check agent-registered treatments and pregnancies.40

Partnerships

Living Goods has worked intensively with BRAC in Uganda and provided consulting services to PSI, The Clinton Foundation, and Marie Stopes International.41

BRAC partnership

Living Goods began, in 2008, as a partnership with BRAC to operate a network of CHPs in Uganda, and in 2009 launched a directly-managed network of CHPs using the same model.42 Living Goods has provided both technical and financial support, totaling over $2 million, to BRAC for the CHP program.43 BRAC has 128 branches with active CHPs in Uganda, but only 24 of these branches currently receive significant funding from Living Goods and have additional features, such as incentive payments for CHPs and a higher number of CHPs per branch.44

BRAC- and Living Goods-managed programs generally operate under the same model, but there are several differences between the programs, including:

• BRAC usually works in poorer, more rural areas.45
• BRAC sells a slightly different mix of drugs and products. For example, BRAC does not sell antibiotics to treat pneumonia because it does not yet have permission to sell antibiotics in Uganda.46
• BRAC and Living Goods have slightly different CHP recruitment, training, and certification processes.47
• BRAC provides a somewhat broader range of health services. For example, its CHPs also focus on immunizations and family planning.48
• Living Goods has a more selective process for hiring branch staff and compensates its branch staff more highly.49
• BRAC and Living Goods have slightly different incentive payments for CHPs.50
• BRAC has invested more staff time in antenatal care.51
• During the RCT, BRAC’s cost per CHP was roughly 50% lower because:52
  • BRAC operates at a larger scale, so its management costs per CHP were lower.
  • BRAC did not provide incentive payments to CHPs for some of the RCT period.
  • Other differences in BRAC’s CHP program (listed above) generally reduced its costs relative to Living Goods’ program.

The RCT discussed below includes both BRAC and Living Goods branches.

Other partnerships

As of 2014, Living Goods is actively working with one additional organization: PSI. It previously worked with PSI in Mozambique and is now working with PSI in Myanmar. In 2014, Living Goods began working with PSI Myanmar to provide “high-touch technical assistance to PSI to design and implement a replication of our Uganda model beginning in two townships.” PSI Myanmar will pay Living Goods over three years for its work, which Living Goods expects to cover most of its costs for the project.53

Living Goods has also provided technical assistance to Marie Stopes International, which was working to create a community health worker network in Kenya,54 and to the Clinton Foundation, to help design a pilot in Peru for an entrepreneurship program.55

Living Goods has three full-time staff members who focus on partnerships. A couple additional staff allocate a percentage of their time to this as well.56

Spending breakdown

We have seen expenditure data for Living Goods for 2012 and 2013 and a budget for 2014.57 Both of the tables below exclude the cost of goods. In both 2012 and 2013, Living Goods fully recovered the cost of goods (and made a margin – see third table below), and it expects to in 2014 as well. When the cost of goods are included in the total for 2012 and 2013, it accounts for about 7% of expenditures in those years.

Expenditures by type (in millions)

Expenditures by program (in millions)

Margin on goods sold

Living Goods organizational structure

Living Goods’ staff consists of about 5 US-based staff, about 35 staff on country-level teams in Uganda and Kenya, 2 field supervisors, and a Branch Manager and Assistant Branch Manager at each of eight branches in Uganda and one Branch Manager in Kenya.58 Country-level staff include staff specializing in training, product development, sales, health impact, logistics, technology, finance, talent, monitoring, and partnerships.59

Does it work?

To evaluate Living Goods’ impact, we considered:

1. Do the health products that CHPs sell improve health and save lives?
2. Does Living Goods increase access to care and/or quality of care?
3. What does the randomized controlled trial of Living Goods’ program say about its impact?
4. What does Living Goods’ ongoing monitoring say about its impact?
5. Has Living Goods’ work with partners had an impact on those projects and have those projects improved or saved lives?
6. Do the products that CHPs sell provide economic benefits?

In short:

• The main evidence for Living Goods’ impact is a randomized controlled trial that found that the program caused a 27% reduction in under-5 mortality. The full details of this study are not yet publicly available. We have some questions about this study that we cannot yet discuss. We plan to publish a review of the study once the authors have published the full report. (More)
• Living Goods collects ongoing monitoring data on various aspects of its programs. We have not seen reports on many aspects of its monitoring, and we have limited confidence in the quality of the monitoring data that has been shared with us, which raises questions about our ability to learn about the impact of future work. (More)
• We have some information about the impact of Living Goods’ partnership with BRAC (mostly from the randomized controlled trial of its program). We do not know how effective Living Goods’ work with its other partners has been. (More)

Details follow.

Do the products that CHPs sell improve health and save lives?

Living Goods says that it “aim[s] to reduce under-five mortality by focusing on an ICCM+ approach, [which] includes quality diagnosis and treatments for pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, encouraging prevention and healthy behaviors, and improving maternal and newborn health, especially in the perinatal period.”60 We have not completed recent evidence reviews for artemisinin-combination therapy (ACT) for malaria (older review of the program here), antibiotics to treat pneumonia or oral rehydration salts to treat diarrhea, but we believe that there is relatively strong evidence to support these programs. We have not researched the efficacy of interventions for newborn conditions. Living Goods told us that it focuses on newborn conditions in particular because it has found that a large portion of child deaths occur in the first month of life and that there are interventions that can significantly reduce this mortality.61 Living Goods’ RCT supported this; it found that 75% of deaths recorded in the RCT were in the first year and 52% in the first month of life.62

CHPs also sell deworming medications and mosquito nets, on which we have completed evidence reviews and believe to be effective. However, the manner in which these products are distributed (one-off purchases rather than community-wide distributions) may affect their impact. In addition, these products account for a small portion of Living Goods’ sales.

Other products and services may also contribute to health, but we have not reviewed the evidence on their impact. Such effects might include improved maternal health from pregnancy support and post-natal visits, reduced indoor air pollution and injuries resulting from use of cookstoves and solar lighting, improved nutrition from the use of fortified foods and vitamins and minerals, and reduced infections from the use of delivery kits and soap for handwashing.

Note that evidence that the products CHPs supply improve health would not be sufficient to demonstrate Living Goods’ impact, because households might obtain the products from other sources in the absence of CHPs. However, this evidence helps provide context on whether the RCT results are plausible.

Does Living Goods increase access to care and quality of care?

Living Goods notes that the drugs it sells are free in public facilities, but that clients may prefer to buy from CHPs because of the cost of traveling to facilities and possibility that the facility will be out of the medicine. According to Living Goods, clients may also be reluctant to buy drugs from other private providers because of the risk of getting a counterfeit medicine.63 Living Goods sent us a study conducted at the midline of its RCT that claims that both availability of counterfeit drugs and drug prices decreased at private retailers in areas where CHPs worked.64 According to the study, about 37% of private drug shops in the areas it studied sold fake ACT drugs,65 and availabilty of fake ACTs was about 50% lower among non-Living Goods sellers in the areas where Living Goods worked.66 Additional results on these potential effects will be made available when the full RCT is published. We have not yet reviewed the study or vetted other claims about how and why consumers choose to obtain medicine.

Living Goods also told us that it recently developed a five-step quality management process for all of its medicines that will be implemented in 2015.67 We do not yet know the details of this process.

Anecdotal evidence from our site visit

Note that areas that we visited and CHPs and customers we interacted with were not selected randomly (more details in footnote).68

Does Living Goods increase access to care and/or quality of care? Where would clients obtain health products from in the absence of CHPs?

Overall, the evidence from our site visit seemed broadly consistent with the possibility that Living Goods is improving access to healthcare and quality of healthcare in the areas where it works. For example, it may be increasing access to essential medication by having lower prices than competitors and a convenient delivery model, and it may be improving quality of care by building trust with its customers. However, we put little weight on this evidence because it is based on limited and potentially non-representative information.

On our site visit, we learned about some customers’ reasons for using Living Goods’ services. For example:

• Some customers told us that Living Goods’ prices are lower than its competitors’ prices.69
• It seemed that some customers buy products from Living Goods because it is convenient.70
• Some customers seem to use Living Goods’ services because they have strong relationships with their CHPs.71

We also visited some private drug sellers in order to try to understand the other healthcare options that were available to people in areas that we visited. These shops seemed to have key medicines and products in stock, such as pneumonia medications, rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for malaria, and antimalarials. We were not able to determine anything about the quality of these drugs. It generally seemed that private drug sellers were reasonably accessible in the areas we visited.72

Living Goods staff gave us more information about other healthcare options that are available to people near the Living Goods Tula branch. They told us:73

• The area is supposed to have Village Health Team members (government community health workers, called “VHTs”), but in practice they rarely work because they are not paid.
• Government health centers provide free treatment, but they are often stocked out of essential medication such as antimalarials. Since travel to these clinics is expensive, some people have stopped attempting to go to them.
• Pharmacies usually have essential medicine in stock but can be expensive. Also, it is often hard to find pharmacies far away from town centers. The cost of a typical course of Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACT, antimalarials) would be about 5,000 UGX (~$1.83) at a pharmacy.
• Private clinics are known for overcharging for treatment, but they are often the only option far away from town centers. The cost of a typical course of ACT at a private clinic would be 12,000 UGX (~$4.40).
• The cost of a typical course of ACT at a hospital would be 6,000 UGX (~$2.20).
• It would cost about 6,000 UGX (~$2.20) to travel to the nearest government hospital from the area – a significant amount of money for poor members of this community.
• Living Goods sells a treatment course of ACT for 3,000 UGX (~$1.10).

We have not independently vetted this information.

Among the limited sample of people we encountered, it seemed that if Living Goods were not an option they would most likely go to private clinics or pharmacies to purchase treatments.74

Are Living Goods products consistently high quality?

The two Living Goods branches that we visited seemed to be following proper protocols as we understood them. In particular, they seemed to be carefully monitoring the supply, condition, and expiration dates of their medications.75

This generally supports the case that Living Goods offers high quality products, but because our experience on the site visit may have been non-representative and there are many other potential factors that may affect the effectiveness of drug treatments aside from following storage procedures for drugs properly, we consider it to be only weak evidence in support of the quality of Living Goods’ drug treatments.

What does the randomized controlled trial of Living Goods’ program say about its impact?

Researchers conducted a cluster-randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the CHP program in Uganda between 2011 and 2013. The study included both villages served by CHPs managed by Living Goods and villages served by CHPs managed by BRAC.76 The researchers have published an abstract on the study,77 and shared a more in-depth report with us. The more in-depth report is not yet cleared for publication because the authors are seeking publication in an academic journal.78 We have some questions based on the in-depth report that we cannot yet discuss. We plan to publish a review of the study once the authors have published the full report.

The study included 214 rural villages and surveyed 8119 households. It found that the program reduced under-five mortality by 27%.79 The under-five mortality effect was smaller (though still statistically significant) in BRAC branches than in Living Goods branches, but the cost per CHP was lower in BRAC branches as well.80 The authors note:81

We find these results highly promising, however we have not fully vetted the results and note that the strongest programs we have considered are backed by multiple studies, while there has only been one rigorous study of the Living Goods program. In addition, from the information we have seen, we have the following concerns:

• It appears that villages may have been carefully selected for inclusion in the sample (i.e. the list that was then divided into treatment and control) and that only a selection of Living Goods and BRAC branches were considered for the list. While this shouldn’t bias the results of the study, it could affect how replicable the results are in other locations.
• With such a program it is not possible to hide from participants whether or not they received the intervention and outcome measures rely on self-reports of events that may have occurred a few years in the past. Those who knew they were part of the program (because they had interacted with a CHP) may have been influenced to give more positive answers. However, this effect is less likely to impact mortality reports than questions on more subjective or less memorable events.

What does Living Goods’ ongoing monitoring say about its impact?

Performance indicators

Living Goods reports on such metrics as number of malaria and diarrhea treatments provided, % of malaria and diarrhea cases followed up within 2 days, number of pregnancy registrations, % of pregnant women delivering in a facility or with trained help, % of women visited in the first 48 hours after giving birth, and % of referral cases followed up. It reports these metrics for both its directly-managed network and for the BRAC network. We have seen data for January 2012 through June 2014.82

We put limited weight on these metrics because:

• The data for these metrics are self-reported by CHPs, who are evaluated on their performance on such metrics and provided financial incentives for certain behaviors,83 which may incentivize them to inflate their reports.

• There is some evidence that CHPs are inflating the data. Living Goods told us that two main ways it checks the accuracy of these reports are to (a) compare the number of malaria and diarrhea treatments it sells to CHPs, to the number of malaria and diarrhea cases that CHPs report treating,84 and (b) conduct monthly analyses (called “outlier reports”) to identify CHPs who report unusually high numbers of malaria or diarrhea treatments, active pregnancies, and/or pregnancies registered.85 In January to August 2014, CHPs reported about 4% more malaria treatments than Living Goods sold to CHPs and about 32% more diarrhea treatments than Living Goods sold.86 Living Goods notes that because dosages vary by the age of the patient and CHPs may choose to stock up on key treatments, over a short time frame, these figures may not fully match.87 For example, with malaria treatments, the package sold equates to 1 adult dosage, 2 doses for an older child, or 4 doses for a younger child.88 This makes it difficult to correlate sales to actual treatments without knowing the exact age of every treatment (which Living Goods expects to be more feasible with the new Android system).89 Living Goods also shared an example of an “outlier report” with us.90 Living Goods told us that the example report includes data from all CHPs who sell health treatments.91 Of this portion of CHPs, it seems that roughly 20% were determined to have reported an unusually high amount of activity for at least one of the outcomes (malaria treatments, diarrhea treatments, active pregnancies, or pregnancies registered).92

• It appears that Living Goods calculates the % of cases followed up as the total number of follow up visits reported divided by the total number of treatments provided. As a result, this rate can exceed 100%. The rate of cases of malaria and diarrhea followed up was over 100% in every month from February to June 2014, reaching a maximum of 133% in April.93

Randomized follow-ups

Living Goods has stated that it “uses randomized follow-ups to improve quality control and monitoring of treatments."94 Living Goods told us that it conducts or has conducted a few types of randomized follow-ups:

• Sometimes, on their field visits, Branch Managers randomly choose and visit a few households in a CHP’s customer register to verify the accuracy of a CHP’s reported activities.95
• Branch Managers visit a sample of customers who received goods or services from CHPs who were identified by an “outliers” report (mentioned above).96
• In the past, it conducted some randomized follow-ups in order to verify the accuracy of CHPs’ pregnancy registrations and newborn visits because CHPs receive an incentive payment for such activity.97

We have not seen any results from such follow-ups. Living Goods told us that it may collect records from these follow-ups but that the records are not readily available because they are not reviewed by staff at the U.S. office.98

Field reports

Branch Managers began recording their evaluations of CHPs during field visits in August 2014.99 The content of these evaluations is described in the oversight section above. We have not seen data from these evaluations.

Stakeholder reports

Living Goods publishes annual “stakeholder reports” which report, at a high level, on organization and program progress. A few interesting notes from the 2013 report:

• In BRAC’s network "under five diarrhea and malaria treatments and sales per CHP fell due to procurement challenges in the second half of the year that affected pricing."100
• Living Goods "developed credit products for both consumers and agents, with an impressively high repayment rate of over 99%."101 We do not know how the repayment rate was calculated.
• Living Goods conducted surveys of CHPs in both Uganda and Kenya, and reported a selection of positive results.102 Living Goods sent us additional information about the CHP surveys, but we have not yet reviewed it.103

Future monitoring plans

As of November 2014, Living Goods was working to revise and strengthen its monitoring and evaluation strategy. It expects to finalize its strategy in early 2015 and plans to implement any monitoring changes shortly after the strategy is finalized.104 Living Goods told us that its new strategy:105

• Will continue to monitor performance against key performance indicators including prompt treatments, pregnancies supported, newborn visits, in stock rates, and more.
• Will rely on increased use of Android smartphones by CHPs in order to track CHP performance real-time and verify the accuracy of CHPs’ reported activity.106 Living Goods’ goal is to eliminate use of paper reporting and convert all agents to 100% mobile data collection.107
• Will continue to rely on reports that Living Goods currently compiles about outlier cases, discrepancies between treatments and sales, and CHP sales performance.
• Will require CHPs to be retested on their health knowledge and ability to properly diagnose and treat annually. Living Goods may collect reports on the percentage of CHPs who do not pass this “recertification” test.
• Will add monitoring tools to verify the accuracy of CHPs’ reported activity.108
• May add monitoring tools to check the quality of CHPs’ diagnoses and prescribed treatments. The new Android platform includes a step-by-step diagnostic program, which Living Goods expects to improve accuracy and consistency of diagnosis and treatment.109
• May involve tracking new performance metrics, such as percentage of treatments diagnosed within 48 hours of contracting illness, nutrition indicators, and geographic coverage (using mobile GPS data).
• May involve conducting quasi-experimental research, such as by implementing a pre-treatment and post-treatment household survey. This aspect of the monitoring and evaluation strategy is least certain.
  

Living Goods expects that BRAC branches will also implement any new monitoring that is implemented at Living Goods branches, though it may be a significant amount of time before BRAC branches implement smartphone monitoring.110

Has Living Goods’ work with partners had an impact on those projects and have those projects improved or saved lives?

As discussed above, the RCT on Living Goods’ program includes an evaluation of the BRAC program that it has provided technical and financial assistance to. We have not seen information on whether Living Goods’ work with other partners has been impactful (about 9% of Living Goods’ total budget from 2012-2014 was spent on non-BRAC partnerships).111

Living Goods’ monitoring of BRAC

Living Goods told us that it conducts some monitoring of BRAC’s programs. For example:112

• Each month, BRAC shares reports on its key performance indicators (i.e., number of malaria and diarrhea treatments provided, number of pregnancy registrations, etc.) with Living Goods. Living Goods reviews the reports and follows up with BRAC about any potential issues.
• In the past, Living Goods staff has carried out randomized checks of BRAC branches.

We have not seen any reports on follow ups with BRAC or randomized checks.

Living Goods told us that it is still in the process of determining how it will monitor BRAC's programs in the future.113

BRAC's programs have independent leadership, so Living Goods may have limited ability to affect BRAC's policies and practices.

BRAC’s monitoring

BRAC told us that it invests a significant amount of staff time in verifying the accuracy of its CHPs’ reported activities and to evaluate the quality of the care that CHPs provide.114 However, we have not seen any reports on details of these evaluations. We summarize the details of the monitoring system BRAC described to us in this footnote.115

BRAC told us that all monitoring reports are collected and summarized at each level of the organization and flow up all the way to the BRAC country office. The BRAC country office summarizes findings from these reports and discusses them at a monthly meeting.116

We learned about BRAC's monitoring shortly before publishing this report. It is our impression from our conversations with Living Goods that it does not regularly request BRAC’s detailed field-level monitoring results.117 We have not yet asked BRAC to share documentation from its monitoring.

Anecdotal evidence from our site visit

During our 2014 site visit to a BRAC branch, we noticed a few potential, likely minor issues:

• CHPs told us that some CHPs sell drugs to drug shop owners, which is against BRAC-LG rules.118
• The branch that we visited seemed to have very few deworming pills (albendazole) left in stock.119
• CHPs reported sometimes running out of medicines and restocking seemed to require paying reasonably expensive travel fees.120

We put limited weight on these concerns because they are based on anecdotal evidence.

BRAC also told us that it is working to strengthen its procurement supply chain because its branches sometimes experience stock-outs.121

Do the products that CHPs sell provide economic benefits?

Some Living Goods products, such as cookstoves and solar energy products, may provide economic benefits to customers by, for example, saving them money on fuel. Living Goods sent us estimates of how much customers who buy cookstoves and solar energy products save.122 Living Goods told us that it estimates that its customers save 50% of their monthly fuel costs on average when using an efficient cookstove, and that typical fuel spending in Uganda tends to be in the range of $20-25 USD per month pre-stove purchase.123 We have not yet reviewed these estimates.

Possible negative or offsetting impact

• Are clients’ problems sometimes misdiagnosed and/or overdiagnosed? We do not know how difficult it is to properly diagnose the various problems that CHPs may come across with a CHP’s level of training. For example, it seems possible that malaria may be difficult to distinguish from pneumonia. Misdiagnosis may cause worse outcomes for clients if they would have sought healthcare providers with better diagnosis skills in the absence of Living Goods’ program. Additionally, since CHPs have a financial incentive to sell more treatments, it seems possible that the Living Goods program could cause CHPs to overdiagnose clients and overprescribe treatments. As discussed in the monitoring section above, Living Goods has told us that it recognizes this concern and has some systems in place to attempt to reduce the likelihood that this occurs, but we are not confident that Living Goods' systems would identify many cases of misdiagnosis or overdiagnosis.
• Are some CHPs harmed by the program? CHPs take on financial risk by joining the program. Living Goods estimates that its CHP turnover rate is about 22% per year, and that 70-80% of CHPs who leave chose to drop out of the program, while the rest are asked to leave.124 We do not know how common it is for CHPs to lose money as a result of their participation.
• Does Living Goods divert skilled labor from other areas? CHPs are fairly well-educated and well-connected members of their communities. Would they have been adding value to their communities in other ways if they were not spending time as a CHP? Given the part-time nature of their work, we would guess that this is not a major concern.

What do you get for your dollar?

Living Goods' estimates

Living Goods has provided estimates of its future cost-per-life saved based on the lives saved per CHP in the RCT and modeling of future costs and numbers of CHPs. These estimates are based on Living Goods Uganda-specific budgets for 2015-2018 and the number of Living Goods-managed agents it expects to have each year. The "mid case" uses the blended mortality reduction estimated by the RCT (25.5%), which includes both Living Goods and BRAC branches, while the "low case" seeks to account for possible reductions in impact during scaling (using 20% for the impact on mortality), and the "best case" uses the mortality reduction observed for Living Goods branches only in 2013 (42%).125

Our adjustments to Living Goods' estimates

Living Goods shared the details of how it calculated its estimates, and we think they are largely reasonable with a few caveats. There are a few additional assumptions we make in our estimates of Living Goods cost effectiveness:126

• Living Goods has included only those costs that it incurs within Uganda or that are allocated to the Uganda program.127 We have included Living Goods' full budget, minus expected program revenue.128 These additional costs support the program directly and indirectly and include US-based costs (e.g., business development, communications and advocacy) and Living Goods’ partnership team. Living Goods told us that it does not include its partnerships team costs in its model of its cost-effectiveness because that team currently has costs but no basis for modeling future associated impact of its spending.129 The partnerships costs represent roughly 17% of Living Goods’ total budget for 2015-2018 and other non-Uganda and non-partnership costs (primarily US-based costs) represent about 10% of Living Goods’ total funding need for those years.130
• The budget Living Goods provided does not include costs of the Kenya program, so these are missing from our model.
• Living Goods' estimates rely on an estimation of the lives saved per CHP based on the 2012 under-5 mortality rate in Uganda. Under-5 mortality fell by about 4-6% per year in Uganda from 2009 to 2012.131 If this trend continues, lives saved per CHP will likely be lower in the future. In some of our scenarios, we have assumed that mortality, in the absence of Living Goods' program, will continue to fall over the next four years.
• In one of our scenarios, we have added an adjustment for contamination of the RCT due to CHPs visiting control group households.132 This contamination could cause the RCT to underestimate the effect of the intervention.
• We have added an adjustment for our subjective guess on whether the RCT results would be replicated if another RCT was done on the scale up program. This adjustment aims to capture both the strength of our belief in the accuracy of the RCT results as well as in the likelihood that Living Goods and BRAC will be able to replicate the results at a greater scale and in somewhat different locations (though still within Uganda). This adjustment is varied across scenarios. However, the average replicability adjustment in our scenarios effectively reduces the mortality reduction in the RCT by about 50%.
• We have varied, across scenarios, the number of years we include in the estimate. Since Living Goods expects its cost per CHP to decline as it scales, it is more conservative to only include costs and benefits for the next 1-3 years than it is to include all 5 years.

Two GiveWell staffers have entered parameters for the various assumptions to derive "pessimistic," "base case," and "optimistic" estimates of Living Goods' cost per life saved (similar in concept to Living Goods' "low case," "mid case," and "best case"). The two staffers used somewhat different assumptions but generated similar estimates:133

• Pessimistic: About $37,000 per life saved

• Base case: About $10,000 per life saved

• Optimistic: About $4,400 per life saved

Details in this spreadsheet.134 In the future, we may ask Living Goods for some additional information that will help us improve the model (details in footnote).135 In the future, we may also conduct further research to help us improve the model (details in footnote).136

Note that the estimate does not take into account any other potential benefits of the program, such as improved health in non-fatal cases or economic benefits from the purchase of money-saving durables such as solar lights, more efficient cook stoves, or water filters (discussed above). The estimate focuses solely on under-5 mortality because this was the primary outcome examined by Living Goods’ RCT. We do not have enough information about Living Goods’ effects on other health outcomes to confidently include them in our analysis.

Average cost per life saved of Living Goods’ Uganda program

The figures discussed above estimate the average cost per life saved by the Living Goods program. This approach is consistent with our approach to estimating cost effectiveness for our top charities and seeks to deal with issues of "leverage" by treating all donor funds the same.

Another approach, and one that Living Goods favors relative to the approach above, would be to attempt to calculate an average cost per life saved for Living Goods’ Uganda program only. This excludes many costs that Living Goods expects to incur regardless of the number of CHPs it supports, namely, U.S. headquarters costs and the costs of supporting the partnership team.

With these assumptions, we estimate a base case of about $7,000 per life saved.137 As noted above, this estimate is not directly comparable with cost effectiveness estimates we have created for other charities.

Is there room for more funding?

Scaling up in Uganda

Scale up plans

Having recently completed the RCT, Living Goods is now aiming to rapidly scale up the networks of CHPs directly managed by Living Goods and managed by BRAC, from about 1,000 CHPs (400 Living Goods, 600 BRAC) to 6,500 CHPs (2,500 Living Goods, 4,000 BRAC).138 Living Goods shared a detailed breakdown of its scale-up plan for networks directly managed by Living Goods with us.139

Living Goods expects its scale-up in Uganda to be similar to its past work in the country.140 Differences may include:

• A greater number of agents per branch.141
• An increased focus on postnatal visits.142
• An increased focus on nutrition products and nutrition education.143
• Work by BRAC on improving the quality of local health facilities, particularly for delivery care, through training, checklists, and new protocols.144
• For the first time, Living Goods will have some male CHPs.145

Living Goods has also noted a couple of ways in which the setting it is working in has changed since the start of the project: bednet coverage is 2-3 times higher and the market price of malaria treatment has been reduced.146 Under-5 mortality in Uganda, according to the World Bank, decreased from 83 per 1,000 live birth in 2009 to 69 in 2012.147

Funding need

In total, Living Goods is seeking funding to support a budget of about $9.6 million per year, including costs incurred by BRAC. Since Living Goods’ overall budget is increasing, it also aims to raise an additional $3 million in reserves (about $2 million in 2015 and about $1 million in 2016).148 It expects to raise some funds from partnership consulting fees and margins on goods sold to CHPs, leaving about $10 million per year that would need to be supported by donor funding.149 In 2012 Living Goods raised $2.8 million, and in 2013 it raised $3.3 million from donors.150 Living Goods told us that it believes there is a decent chance it will reach two-thirds of its funding target for the first year through agreements with funders who have supported its work in the past, but the money has not yet been secured and the funding need will grow each year.151 The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), one of Living Goods’ major core funders historically, will be deciding in Q1 2015 whether to fund Living Goods' scale-up. CIFF has indicated a significant interest in funding up to 50% of Living Goods’ costs for 2015-2018, with the condition that Living Goods raises approximately $1 for every $1 CIFF contributes.152 Regardless of CIFF’s decision, Living Goods is actively seeking funding from new and existing donors to fill its funding gap and plans to use these funds to support scaling up in Uganda and its partnerships and advocacy team’s efforts to help organizations replicate the model in other places.153

Living Goods told us that BRAC is largely relying on Living Goods to secure funding for BRAC's portion of the Uganda scale-up.154

Uganda scale-up budget 2015-2018 (in millions)155

Operations in Kenya

Living Goods told us that in the past it has used a mix of unrestricted and restricted funding to support its operations in Kenya.156 In 2015, Living Goods told us that it plans to spend about $700,000 in Kenya,157 which is similar to the roughly $750,000 it spent in 2014.158 As far as we know, Living Goods does not have plans to use further unrestricted funds to scale up in Kenya. Living Goods told us that if it decided to significantly expand or change its operations in Kenya, it would find additional independent funding to support this.159

Replication fund

Living Goods has told us that scaling up in Uganda is its top priority, but in order to have the transformational impact it seeks, it wants to demonstrate that the model can work in other markets. To this end, Living Goods and CIFF are discussing creating a fund for replications of its program by partners. If it received sufficient funding for its scale-up, it may allocate unrestricted funds to the replication fund.160 Living Goods has proposed creating a fund of $10-15 million to provide co-funding for programs in three countries that would reach 3-5 million people per country; it estimates that the full cost of a new country program would be $10-15 million,161 so its support would cover 33% of the total. It expects that having such a fund would improve its ability to negotiate and launch new projects with partners.162

It plans to target countries based on:163

1. Need/impact: high child mortality rates driven by malaria, diarrhea, respiratory infections, and neonatal conditions; high rates of counterfeit drugs; high drug prices; low rates of use of water filters, clean cookstoves, and solar lights.
2. Economics/sustainability: reasonable household purchasing power, and large (over 15 million) populations with high population density.
3. Governance: low security risk and a government that will allow the program to sell medicines.
4. Current partner presence: Living Goods would prefer to work with partners that already have relationships in country.

Based on these criteria, Living Goods is most strongly considering partnerships in Nigeria, India, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Myanmar.164 Possible partners include PSI, Management Sciences for Health, Marie Stopes International, CARE, BRAC, Save the Children, and Plan International.165

Living Goods as an organization

We have limited observations on which to base an assessment of Living Goods as an organization. However, our sense is that Living Goods is a strong organization:

• Track record: Living Goods is a relatively young organization; it was founded in 2007. Its RCT, though not yet fully vetted, appears to have found strong effects of its program. However, we feel that we have limited information on its track record because we have not seen detailed, high-quality monitoring of its program. We expect to learn more about Living Goods as an organization as we see how it handles the challenges of scaling up its program and tracking the quality of its program as it scales.
• Self-evaluation: Living Goods has invested unusually heavily in understanding the impact of its program by completing a RCT of its program. It has also demonstrated a commitment to collecting information on its program on an ongoing basis, though we believe that this information is less rigorous than that of some of our other top charities to date.
• Communication: Living Goods has communicated clearly and directly with us and given thoughtful answers to our critical questions.
• Transparency: Living Goods has consistently been strong in its commitment to transparency. We have not seen it hesitate to share information publicly (unless it had what we felt was a good reason).

More on how we think about evaluating organizations at our 2012 blog post.

Sources

• 1.

  “LG noted in a document it sent that there have been some issue with the RCT it is currently conducting. We asked about this, and LG told us that there were both changes in the geographic footprint of the model and some flaws in the RCT survey strategy which are rendering the results not reliable from an evaluative point of view.
  1. Spillover: Control sites were found to have experienced about 1/3 as much of the exposure to LG as treatment sites.
  2. Service area for each agent: They had to guess service areas for each agent when they started and their guesses were quite different from how the program evolved. The RCT was designed with service areas that were much larger in terms of number of households and geographic area than agents are actually able to cover. For example: a significant number of survey-defined areas included 200-400 households, and subsequent research shows that the number of households in a given agent's area is closer to 100. Researchers are concerned that any attempts to ameliorate this effect would compromise randomization.
  3. Treatment population not matched to treatment area: LG did a GPS tracking exercise on how far and where agents worked and compared this data to data from the RCT. They found that 80% of the homes actually served by agents were within 500 meters of agents' homes. However, 50% of households in surveyed in the RCT were over 1.2 km from agents homes.
  4. There is also some agent activity that is in neither in control or treatment sites, constituting
  impacts that will not be detected.”

  GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Chuck Slaughter, July 20, 2012.

• 2.
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014
• 3.

  “Recruitment activities include:
  1. Mapping out areas where gaps exist or where we should expand CHP
  coverage.
  2. Meeting with LCs, women’s groups, other NGOs, religious and local leaders to get referrals for CHP candidates.
  3. Explaining and distributing CHP candidate referral forms to existing CHPs.
  4. Assist Field Supervisors and Training Team with oral interviews,administering exams, and explaining requirements to CHP candidates.”
  Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 8.

• 4.

  “Criteria Over the years, Living Goods has found successful CHPs share a few key traits. As you run recruitment activities with local leaders, here are the characteristics you will look for in CHP candidates:
  1. Ability to dedicate 2 hours per day to sales and education activities for Living Goods. Keep in mind women with very young children might not be able to dedicate enough time.
  2. Minimum 7 years of schooling.
  3. 25-45 years old.
  4. Fluent in local language(s).
  5. Able to read/communicate in basic English.
  6. Married (or no other plans to move soon).
  7. Friendly, active, and known in her community with connections in social or women’s groups.
  8. Previous work experience or training in health or business skills is desired (but not mandatory).
  9. Ability to pass a basic math/reading test in English."
  Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 8.

• 5.

  “There are no right answers to these questions. The most important aspects of the interview arise from the interaction. Does this person communicate well? Does she understand the questions and respond appropriately? Has she demonstrated genuine interest in the work and the competence to carry it out?” Living Goods CHP Interview Guide.

• 6.
  • “Every Living Goods agent receives 2-3 weeks of initial health and business training. Agents are trained on all key health topics, including diagnosing, treating and recognizing danger signs for referral. Agents are also trained on important aspects of running a business such as managing working capital, calculating profit, and record-keeping. Finally, agents are trained in best practice sales skills, counseling, and communication.” Living Goods Training & Coaching.
  • “To operate as a Living Goods CHP, applicants must:
    • Attend two weeks of training and pass the test at the end
    • On passing the test, invest UGX 82,000 in the tools and initial inventory to build their business. A 6-month loan is available, with a UGX 25,000 deposit required up-front to get commodities worth 54,000 UGX and a phone worth 270,000 UGX.
    • Commit to spending at least 2 hours per day visiting households in their zone.”

    Living Goods CHP Profile and Expectations, Pg 1.

  • In the future, all CHPs will also be trained to use Android during initial training. ”The full LG training course lasts 12 full work days and covers health (5 days), how to use Android (4 days), and business/sales (3 days).” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014
  • We attended a training for CHPs and new Branch Managers on our 2014 site visit. The teaching methods seemed to be high quality and trainees seemed to be engaged. “Overall, this training seemed to be high quality because:
    • The teaching methods seemed thoughtful – the trainer varied the way that she asked questions so that sometimes all of the trainees responded and sometimes individuals who seemed to be struggling or who were less engaged were asked to respond. She also had two trainees perform in a skit about treating diarrhea that seemed to keep trainees engaged. The training went through a series of diarrhea case studies that seemed nuanced and helpful.
    • It was very high energy – roughly every 30 minutes, there was a break to dance and sing together and all of the audience seemed excited during these breaks.
    • The training was held in a bright, cool room (kept cool by fans) and there was a projected presentation for trainees to follow along with.”

    Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 7.
  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 8.
  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 9.

  “To operate as a Living Goods CHP, applicants must:

  • Attend two weeks of training and pass the test at the end
  • On passing the test, invest UGX 82,000 in the tools and initial inventory to build their business. A 6-month loan is available, with a UGX 25,000 deposit required up-front to get commodities worth 54,000 UGX and a phone worth 270,000 UGX.
  • Commit to spending at least 2 hours per day visiting households in their zone.”

  Living Goods CHP Profile and Expectations, Pg 1.

  According to Google, UGX 82,000 was worth USD 31.48 on September 4, 2014.

• 10.

  “Living Goods equips CHPs with:

  • Free training for 2 weeks on health and business.
  • A business-in-a-bag with tools and branding materials
  • A touch phone to support the CHP’s health work
  • A start-up loan for the purchase of initial products, to be repaid over 6 months
  • Ongoing Stocking of products at Living Goods branches
  • On-going training as they work”

  Living Goods CHP Profile and Expectations, Pg 1.

  “Our business-in-a-bag provides micro-entrepreneurs with all the tools they need to launch a thriving Living Goods franchise. Their startup kit includes a branded duffle bag, uniforms, signs for their home store, a display locker, and basic health and business tools. Couple that with a robust two-week training course and ongoing marketing and mentoring support and you have an army of motivated agents bringing life-changing products to the doorsteps of the poor.” Living Goods Business-In-A-Bag.

• 11.

  “After initial training, Living Goods will provide in-service trainings for CHPs. This is an excellent opportunity for Branch Staff to expand their own learning as well as check in with CHPs on challenges and successes.” Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 9.

  “Agents also attend one day of training every month to review key health or business topics, discuss operational issues, hear about new policies and learn about new product offerings.” Living Goods Training & Coaching.

• 12.
  • The number of applicants that Living Goods interviews for each trainee was mentioned to us during a conversation with Alfred Wise on the Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014. Not included directly in site visit notes.
  • “At the end of training, LG tests trainees’ health knowledge and Android skills. Usually, about 5-10% of trainees fail these tests.” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014
• 13.
  • Living Goods Ugandan Monthly Sales
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014
• 14.

  “It is your responsibility to hold your branch’s CHPs to these standards:
  1. 100% stocking of essential items (ORS + zinc, amoxicillin, ACTs)...”
  Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 9.

• 15.
  • “For sales data, Branch Staff can run reports on performance directly from the POS. The IT team will also communicate with you on the purchase performance of CHPs each month.” Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 9.
  • The document later explains that the POS is the system that branches use to record sales to CHPs. Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 14.
  • Living Goods confirmed that the sales data represents sales from Living Goods to CHPs in Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014.
• 16.
  • Chuck Slaughter, conversation with GiveWell, July 29, 2014.
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014
• 17.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014

• 18.
  • Data from Living Goods Ugandan Monthly Sales, summarized in sheet ‘Analysis by GiveWell.’
  • Living Goods provided a list of sales for 974 products, many of which are listed multiple times. Based on the names, we categorized these into product type. We believe that we have categorized correctly for a large portion of the products, but we may not have been fully accurate. For 0.55% of sales, we were not confident enough to guess a category. We have converted from Ugandan shillings to US dollars.
  • Note: Units may be misleading for products that are sold in larger packets. For example, in one product, 1 unit contains 10 ORS dosages. Some food products come in larger packaging in which 1 unit may contain 10 or 30 smaller packets. (Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014)
  • Data on sales margins from Living Goods Product List (July 2014).
• 19.

  “Over the last four years we built a network in Uganda of over 1,000 sales agents and are on our way to establishing a self-funded system for fighting disease and poverty in the developing world. With Uganda on the road to sustainability, we were ready to take what we learned and open a second country - Living Goods Kenya began operating in 2013.” Living Goods Where We Work.

• 20.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014

• 21.

  Data from Living Goods Kenya Monthly Sales, summarized in sheet ‘Analysis by GiveWell.’

  Living Goods provided a list of sales for 82 products. Based on the names, we categorized these into product type. We believe that we have categorized correctly for a large portion of the products, but we may not have been fully accurate. For 2.3% of sales, we were not confident enough to guess a category. We have converted from Kenya shillings to US dollars.

• 22.

  “BRAC and LG agents go house-to-house, teaching families better health practices across the core impact areas noted above. Agents evaluate and advise homes on nutrition, family planning, hygiene practices, use of key preventative methods including bed nets, water treatment, clean stoves, and solar lights.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 4.

• 23.

  “During household visits agents check children’s health and use ICCM guided assessment to address any illness.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 4.

  Details on ICCM at WHO/UNICEF Integrated Community Case Management.

• 24.
  Living Goods told us that CHPs carry out these activities while we were on the Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 25.

  “Agents provide all clients with their mobile phone number so customers may reach them promptly when a child is ill or they need health commodities.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 4.

• 26.

  “As noted above, agents seek to identify and register and support pregnancies. LG and BRAC provide small financial incentives for each registration and for key pre and post-natal visits. CHPs make two to three ante natal visits to educate the expectant moms, check for danger signs and risk factors, encourage ANC checks at health centers, promote the use of iron folate and a healthy diet, prophylaxis for malaria, and help clients plan for their delivery and newborn care. We sell clean delivery kits to help prevent sepsis.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 5.

• 27.

  “As the majority of reported deaths are occurring in the first month, we will place a particular emphasis on post-natal visits and proper newborn care as noted above. Agents must visit the new moms as soon as possible after the delivery, and once more in the first week. We provide a free cozy cap to every new mom who notifies their CHP when they are in labor or within 24 hours of the birth to help ensure the PNCs happen promptly.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 5.

  “As they do now, agents will register pregnancies as early as in term as possible, provide basic ante natal care and encourage ANC visits at public health centers, deliver maternal vitamin supplements, help all mothers deliver in proper facilities, and importantly, ensure proper newborn care practices.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 3.

• 28.

  “Agents provide community health education through regular community health talks, especially leveraging connections with local community groups, schools, places of worship, and support from local leaders and council members.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 4.

  “It is your responsibility to hold your branch’s CHPs to these standards:...
  2. Carry out at least 2 community events each month.” Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 9.

• 29.

  “The Branch Manager and Assistant Manager should meet with or talk to each CHP in their branch at least once a month.” Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 9.

• 30.

  “It is your responsibility to hold your branch’s CHPs to these standards:
  3. Properly report health data (pregnancy registrations, under 5
  treatments, etc.) each month.” Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 9.

• 31.
  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Betty Kyazike. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 32.

  Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 10-13.

• 33.

  Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 10. 165,000 UGX converted to USD with Google.

• 34.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014

• 35.
  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 36.
  “CHPs maintain a family register that contains information such as: whether a pregnant woman, child under 1 year old, and/or child under 5 years old lives in a household, the household’s phone number, and the last time the CHP visited the household. The CHPs said that at the beginning of their work day they check the register and prioritize visiting priority households (e.g., households with young children or pregnant mothers) that they have not visited recently. In the future, the family register could be kept on CHPs’ Android phones exclusively. Currently, some CHPs still use paper registers because they have not transferred all of their records to their phones.” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014
• 37.
  “One of the CHPs did a demonstration of how she uses her Android phone to diagnose patients. The phone has a Living Goods app that walked her through the questions she needed to ask and then provided a diagnosis. The app also tells the CHP what drug to provide for a certain illness and in what dosage. We made up some mild symptoms in response to the diagnosis questions, and the CHP seemed to easily use the app to fill in our responses. The app determined that our fake mild symptoms were not significant enough to require treatment.” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014
• 38.
  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 39.
  • “All of Mpigi’s CHPs are now using Android phones. LG is piloting its new Android system in four of its eight branches.” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014
• 40.
  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014
• 41.

  “In addition to BRAC, Living Goods has helped three other major multi-national NGOs pilot variations of the Living Goods model: Population Services International, The Clinton Foundation and Marie Stopes. To support these and future collaborations we have created a separate, robust division to drive our influence and partnerships strategy. We have assembled a highly capable five-person team with deep experience across public health, business, partnerships, consulting, and communications (see appendix for bios).” Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pg 1.

• 42.

  “BRAC and Living Goods have worked together since 2008 to build this entrepreneurial community health worker (CHW) model in Uganda. LG launched its own network of CHPs in Uganda in 2009 as an engine of innovation to deepen the impact and sustainability of the model.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pgs 1-2.

  “Big partnerships are core to our DNA as LG started as a collaboration with BRAC in Uganda.” Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pg 1.

• 43.

  “Over the years of the BRAC-Living Goods partnership, Living Goods has provided support in a wide range of areas, including: business planning, procurement, health communications, inventory management, monitoring and evaluation, as well as over $2 million in funding for the partnership.” Living Goods BRAC Partnership.

• 44.
  • “BRAC has 128 branches with active community health promoters (CHPs). Until July 2014, 24 of these branches received funding from Living Goods (LG). These LG-BRAC branches provided augmented support and services, including cash incentives for CHPs and more CHPs per branch. BRAC plans to gradually expand these additional program components to its other 104 branches as part of the scale-up of the LG-BRAC partnership in Uganda.”
  • ”Differences between standard BRAC-LG branches and BRAC-only branches include a more robust set of services and support for the former, including:
    • Although all BRAC promoters make a profit from the sale of health commodities, BRAC-LG promoters have additional incentives that BRAC-only promoters do not have (see below).
    • BRAC-LG branches have 40 CHPs per branch as opposed to 20 at BRAC-only branches.”
  • Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014
• 45.
  • Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014
  • Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 46.

  ”When PAs visit CHPs in the field, they observe their performance on household visits and check their bags to ensure that they are not selling any forbidden drugs (such as antibiotics, which BRAC is not allowed to sell).”
  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 47.
  • ”BRAC generally recruits promoters by:
    • Advertising in a village and collecting applications from interested people.
    • Asking Local Councilpeople (local political leaders) for recommendations.
    • Advertising the position to BRAC microfinance borrowers and asking borrowers to recommend others for the position.
  • BRAC’s criteria for hiring promoters are similar to LG’s criteria. For example, it looks for women ages 25-45 who are literate and do not have a child under 2-years-old. BRAC does not have a written application process, but compiles a list of interested potential CHPs and interviews them.
  • About one-third of BRAC promoters are also Village Health Team workers (government community health workers).
  • BRAC does a 10-day health training program for its CHPs. Its health training program has more components (e.g., immunization and family planning) than LG’s health training program. The BRAC country office designed this training based on Uganda Ministry of Health guidelines and internationally approved guidelines and procedures.
  • BRAC administers a written test at the end of the training program. After the training ends, a PA also evaluates each CHP’s health knowledge by observing them in the field. All PAs have a background in health. A PA has the authority to dismiss a CHP if her health knowledge is lacking.”
  • Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014
• 48.

  “BRAC promoters focus on immunization and family planning in addition to standard Integrated Community Case Management (ICCM) activities (which largely focus on treating malaria and diarrhea, while identifying and making referrals for pneumonia).” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 49.
  Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014
• 50.

  ”BRAC incentives for BRAC-LG promoters:

  • If a BRAC-LG promoter registers and supports 14 pregnant women in a month, she receives 2,000 UGX (about $0.74). She receives 500 UGX for each additional registered pregnancy.
  • If a BRAC-LG promoter treats more than six diarrhea treatments in a month, she receives 200 UGX for each additional diarrhea treatment over the threshold of 6.
  • A BRAC-LG promoter receives 5,000 UGX for escorting a sick child under 1-year-old to a government health facility. She can receive this incentive for up to two cases per month. To receive the incentive, she must have a doctor’s signature on a medical form that says she referred the patient.
  • Before paying incentives, BRAC staff visits every relevant patient that the CHP served. More details on this process are below.”

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 51.

  “During the first phase of the partnership BRAC and Living Goods experimented with differing variations in the operational model. For example BRAC invested more in staff time on ante-natal care, did more organized health talks, and kept costs lower. LG tested more new products, integrated use of mobile messaging and supported more agents per branch.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 3.

• 52.
  Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014
• 53.

  “PSI Myanmar recently won an $8 million three-year grant from the 3MDG fund. The 3MDG Fund is financed by seven major donors, committing over US$330 million from 2012 to 2016, with significant investment going to Maternal, Newborn and Child Health. Under this award PSI Myanmar asked Living Goods for help developing a cost effective network of community health entrepreneurs. PSI Myanmar currently operates the Sun Quality Health network of over 300 social franchised health clinics and the Sun Primary Health network of over 2,000 community health workers, supporting reproductive health,malaria, diarrhea and WASH activities. Living Goods is providing high-touch technical assistance to PSI to design and implement a replication of our Uganda model beginning in two townships in Myanmar. PSI sees near-term potential to test in additional sites and opportunity to rapidly scale thereafter. ” Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pg 7.

• 54.

  “Marie Stopes International (MSI), a leader in international family planning, operates networks of franchised and owned clinics in over 40 countries. Living Goods is working with MSI in Kenya to bolt on a system of community health entrepreneurs to its network of clinics. Along with health referrals and consultations, branded mobile Marie Stopes agents will use our business-in-a-bag strategy to sell essential products to their communities. These ‘Blue Star’ agents will be the first of their kind for MSI, and if successful, the model may scale across Marie Stopes’ global system.” Living Goods Partner Organizations.

• 55.

  “The Clinton Foundation’s Sustainable Growth Initiative received $200 million in funding to build sustainable enterprises in Latin America with the goal of creating incomes for thousands of entrepreneurs. The Clinton team called on Living Goods to help design their pilot in Peru, where agents are already branded, trained, and selling in their communities. Starting from scratch, Living Goods helped CGSGI choose their product mix, hire and train their agents, and set up an effective inventory control system.” Living Goods Partner Organizations.

• 56.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014

• 57.

  All data in this section from Living Goods unaudited financials (2012-2013) and Living Goods budget (2014), and summarized in GiveWell spending analysis for Living Goods (November 2014).

• 58.

  Living Goods Org Chart (August 2014).

  “In summary, we seek to… Expand Living Goods Uganda from seven to 18 branches.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 1.

• 59.

  Living Goods Org Chart (August 2014).

• 60.
  • Details on ICCM at WHO/UNICEF Integrated Community Case Management.
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014.
• 61.

  “Approximately half (45%) of all child deaths occur in the first month of life. There is evidence that skilled birth attendance in a facility, exclusive and immediate breastfeeding, thermal care, and keeping the mother and baby in a clean, sanitary environment (and preventing infection of the cord site) can reduce neonatal mortality significantly." Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014

• 62.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 63.

  “While drugs are free in public facilities, the cost of transport often exceeds the price we charge, so because we deliver to the client’s doorstep the model technically ‘cheaper than free’. Customers are glad to pay for the convenience of home delivery. (That transport cost is often lost altogether as the public dispensaries suffer high stock out rates.) Customers also value LG and BRAC over many private providers where they know the risk of counterfeits is high.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 6.

• 64.

  “We study the determinants of antimalarial drug quality in developing countries using data
  from the retail market in Uganda. We find that common biomedical misconceptions among
  consumers are associated with overly optimistic beliefs about quality, and lower quality sold
  by retailers. We use a field experiment and find that entry by an NGO selling authentic drugs
  significantly reduced fake drugs among incumbents, with weaker effects in markets where
  consumer misconceptions were relatively pervasive. The results are consistent with a simple
  experience good model where biomedical misconceptions decrease consumers’ ability to infer
  quality, which retailers exploit by selling lower quality medicines.” Bjorkman-Nykvist et al. 2013.

• 65.

  "Using a covert shopper approach and testing for authenticity using Raman Spectroscopy, we show that the market is characterized by quality problems: 37 percent of the private drug shops, a majority of them local monopolies, sell fake ACT drugs." Bjorkman-Nykvist et al. 2013.

• 66.

  "After the NGO entered a village, the share of authentic ACTs sold by the incumbent drug shops increased by 11-13 percentage points, corresponding to a decrease in fake drugs of approximately 50 percent." Bjorkman-Nykvist et al. 2013.

• 67.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 68.
  • Details on selection of branches we visited:
    • ”LG chose to show us the Mpigi branch on the site visit because it is the branch closest to Kampala that has begun using Android phones as part of its operations. All of Mpigi’s CHPs are now using Android phones. LG is piloting its new Android system in four of its eight branches.”
    • ”LG told us that it frequently brings donors to the Tula branch on site visits because the branch is very easy to reach from Kampala.”
    • Tula is one of Living Goods’ highest-performing branches, and Mpigi is one of the branches that was included in Living Goods’ RCT, so it is a relatively experienced branch, though a middle-performing branch in terms of sales.
      • “Tula is one of the highest performing LG branches. The treatment targets for individual CHPs are higher at the Tula branch than at other branches because of its strong performance.”
      • ”LG’s Mpigi branch has been in operation for about four years. It was one of the two LG branches included in LG’s randomized controlled trial of its program.”
      • ”Mpigi’s sales performance is roughly in the middle of all LG branches – it is neither one of the highest-performing nor lowest-performing branches.”
  • Details on selection of some CHPs we visited:
    • ”Two of the CHPs began working for LG in 2010 while the other two began working for LG in July 2014. LG intentionally chose two more experienced and two less experienced CHPs so that we could see how CHPs with different experience levels were handling the shift to the new Android system.”
  • All quotes from Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014.
  • It is our impression that customers we visited were neither intentionally chosen by CHPs or Living Goods staff for our site visit nor randomly chosen. It seemed that they were the customers who the CHPs would have visited that day even had we not been there.
• 69.
  • "If LG were not an option, the mother said she would have had to go to a public clinic to get a diagnosis and then would likely have purchased treatments from a private seller...She prefers to buy from LG because: LG’s products are less expensive. For example, she bought a full course of Zinc+ORS treatment for 200 UGX from LG. The same treatment would have cost about 800 UGX from a private seller."
  • "The mother sometimes goes to the nearby drug shop (which is a few doors down) when a CHP is not around, but she said that drugs are more expensive there. She said that the shop has all of the common drugs. When she believes that her child may have malaria, she first goes to the drug shop for a rapid diagnostic test (RDT), which costs 3,000 UGX, to confirm the diagnosis, and then purchases Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACT) from a CHP."
  • ”We visited 9 households total, most of which Betty had previously treated. The most common reason why people said they buy from CHPs is that LG’s prices are lower than other options.”

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 70.
  • "While we were walking to see another customer, a woman yelled out to Pauline to ask to buy some MixMe (a nutritional supplement for children similar to Sprinkles)...This woman did not have time to talk, but Pauline explained that she previously sold a cook stove to this woman. She uses the cook stove to keep her baby chicks warm at night."
  • "If LG were not an option, the mother said she would have had to go to a public clinic to get a diagnosis and then would likely have purchased treatments from a private seller.”
  • ”Mr. Oundo [Living Goods Field Supervisor] discussed one case in which a woman’s young child had diarrhea and the child’s condition was deteriorating, but the mother could not seek treatment because she did not have money to travel and her husband was out of town. LG found her by going door-to-door and provided treatment.”

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 71.
  • ”She prefers to buy from LG because: ... Pauline [a CHP] has worked with her for many years--since before her currently sick child was born."
  • "The mother told us that she sees Teddy [a CHP] as a kind of doctor to her and that she has known her for a long time because Teddy was her teacher in grade school."
  • ”Betty seemed especially helpful to a 17-year-old pregnant woman who was having a baby for the first time and knew little about antenatal care. Betty encouraged her to make an appointment at an antenatal clinic and said that she would follow up with her soon."

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 72.
  • "Private clinic - “Lifecare Domiciliary Clinic”: This clinic was located directly across the street from the LG branch. The clinic manager, who spoke English, showed us that he had multiple types of ACT for treating malaria. He explained that he administers an RDT before recommending malaria treatment. He said that he does not run out of malaria medication because he can always order more. We asked him about the expiration dates of his drugs. He found the dates after a few seconds and explained that if drugs expired then the clinic would dispose of them. He did not seem to recognize the name Living Goods or know about its program."
  • "Pharmacy: We visited a pharmacy that was right next to CHP # 2’s Customer #3’s home. The pharmacy was private, but it was registered with the government and apparently audited by the Ministry of Health. It was not a clinic; it only seemed to sell medications. We spoke with a nurse who staffed the store. She explained that the store sells pneumonia medications and other antibiotics. It also carries RDTs and seems to do diagnosis and refers sick people to clinics. The shop is open about 3-4 hours per day because the nurse manages a different drug shop in the morning."
  • ”We also noticed a larger, more formal-seeming drug shop on a main road nearby the neighborhood that we visited with CHP #2."

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 73.
  • "We also asked these LG staff members about the other healthcare options that are available to people living near the Tula branch. Major points from this discussion were:
    • This area is supposed to have Village Health Team members (government community health workers, called “VHTs”), but in practice they rarely work because they are not paid.
    • If people do not use LG’s services, they frequently go to government health centers, where treatments are free. However, these centers are frequently stocked out of essential medication (e.g. antimalarials) and travel to these clinics is often expensive. Some people have stopped trying to go to government health centers and begun using LG instead because purchasing from LG ends up being less expensive than traveling to the public clinic to get free treatments.
    • Mr. Oundo discussed one case in which a woman’s young child had diarrhea and the child’s condition was deteriorating, but the mother could not seek treatment because she did not have money to travel and her husband was out of town. LG found her by going door-to-door and provided treatment.
    • According to LG staff, the cost of ACTs at different providers is roughly:
      • Private clinics: 12,000 UGX
      • Clinics are notorious for overcharging but they are often the only option far away from town centers.
      • Hospitals: 6,000 UGX
      • Pharmacies: 5,000 UGX
      • Pharmacies usually have essential medication in stock but can be expensive. Also, it is often hard to find pharmacies far away from town centers.
      • LG: 3,000 UGX
      • Public health centers: free (but frequently out of stock)
      • It would cost about 6,000 UGX to reach the nearest government hospital from this area – a significant amount of money for poor members of this community."

    " Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

  • According to Google, USD 1 was worth about UGX 2,732 on November 12, 2014.
• 74.
  • “If LG were not an option, the mother said she would have had to go to a public clinic to get a diagnosis and then would likely have purchased treatments from a private seller.”
  • ”The mother sometimes goes to the nearby drug shop (which is a few doors down) when a CHP is not around, but she said that drugs are more expensive there. She said that the shop has all of the common drugs. When she believes that her child may have malaria, she first goes to the drug shop for a rapid diagnostic test (RDT), which costs 3,000 UGX, to confirm the diagnosis, and then purchases Artemisinin Combination Therapy (ACT) from a CHP.”
  • "[A relatively wealthy potential customer] did not purchase anything from LG but said she may contact Pauline in the future if she has any needs...Currently, she goes to private clinics and pharmacies for all of her health needs. She did not know about LG until this visit."

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 75.
  • [At Mpigi branch] “Betty Kyazike, Stella Kanyesigye, and Gracious Nabwire were very enthusiastic about LG’s program and seemed to have a strong grasp of the proper branch procedures as laid out by LG. For example, the expiration dates of drugs in the stockroom were very clearly tracked and displayed. The branch seemed to have plenty of each drug remaining and no drugs were in danger of expiring within the next several months. We checked the expiration dates on the drugs’ packaging, and they matched the summaries of expiration dates that the branch had displayed.”
  • [At Tula branch] “The expiration dates of drugs in the stockroom were clearly tracked and displayed. The branch seemed to have plenty of each drug remaining and no drugs were in danger of expiring within the next several months. We checked the expiration dates on the drugs’ packaging, and they matched the summaries of expiration dates that the branch had displayed.”

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 76.

  “In treatment villages, Living Goods and BRAC Community Health Promoters conducting home visits, educating households on essential health behaviors and selling preventive and curative health products at 20-30% below prevailing retail prices were deployed over a three-year period (2011-2013).” Bjorkman-Nykvist et al. 2014 abstract.

• 77.

  Bjorkman-Nykvist et al. 2014 abstract

• 78.

  Lisa McCandless, Living Goods Director of Business Development, email to GiveWell, July 24, 2014.

• 79.

  Note: though the published preliminary abstract (Bjorkman-Nykvist et al. 2014 abstract) says that the program reduced under-five mortality by 25%, the more up-to-date unpublished report that Living Goods shared with us shows the under-five mortality reduction to be 27%. Living Goods told us that 27% is the more accurate number (Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014).

• 80.
  Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014
• 81.
  • Bjorkman-Nykvist et al. 2014 abstract.
  • Updated numbers for treatment of diarrhea and postnatal visits from Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014
• 82.

  Living Goods Quarterly Dashboard covers January 2012 to March 2014. Living Goods Health Dashboard (June 2014) covers January 2013 to June 2014 for the directly-managed network only.

• 83.

  “It is your responsibility to hold your branch’s CHPs to these standards:
  ...
  3. Properly report health data (pregnancy registrations, under 5 treatments, etc.) each month.
  4. Registering pregnancies: 7 per month
  5. Treating (children under 5): a. Malaria: 13 per month, b. ORS + Zinc: 6 per month”
  Living Goods Draft Branch Management Handbook, Pg 9.

  “LG and BRAC provide small financial incentives for each registration and for key pre and post-natal visits.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 5.

• 84.

  Chuck Slaughter, conversation with GiveWell, July 29, 2014.

• 85.

  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014.

• 86.

  Living Goods Treatment vs. Sales Summary (January to August 2014). Note: We did not analyze the other two metrics included in this spreadsheet ("Delivery Kits Sold as % of new registrations" and "Delivery Kits Sold as % of Deliveries") because we are not sure what we should expect these percentages to be if CHPs are accurately reporting Delivery Kits sales.

• 87.

  “Dosage levels vary by age of patient, so our mapping of sales to treatments, which is based on historical age of treatment data, is not expected to be completely accurate. Second, agents often stock-up on key treatments, and as such, it is typical to see month to month fluctuations in sales and reported treatments. Over time, we want the figures to be approximately even, but expect that in any given month, we maybe above or below 100%.” Living Goods GiveWell Document Request Guide.

• 88.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 89.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 90.

  Living Goods Health Reporting Outliers (August 2014)

• 91.
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014
  • The data in Sheet “Health X CHP Data” appears to be the raw data for the report. This sheet contains data for about 250 CHPs. See Living Goods Health Reporting Outliers (August 2014), Sheet “Health X CHP Data”
• 92.
  Compare overall number of CHPs in Sheet “Aggregate Outlier List” (about 50) with number of CHPs in Sheet “Health X CHP Data” (about 250), Living Goods Health Reporting Outliers (August 2014).
• 93.

  Living Goods Health Dashboard (June 2014).

• 94.

  Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 2.

• 95.

  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014

• 96.

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Emilie Chambert. Not included directly in site visit notes.

• 97.

  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014

• 98.

  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014

• 99.

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Betty Kyazike

• 100.

  Living Goods Stakeholder Report (2013), Pg 4.

• 101.

  Living Goods Stakeholder Report (2013), Pg 3.

• 102.

  "LG took time this year to better understand its impact on the lives of agents, with agent surveys in both Uganda and Kenya. Results were promising and rewarding: since joining LG, 97% of agents in Uganda report improved status in their communities. 95% of agents reported that LG has taught them new skills that will help them get another job or start a business in future. Over 90% said they would recommend Living Goods to a friend. In Kenya, 72% of agents are primary income earners. 32% of agents had an income of less than $2/day, and 85% support their children with their earnings. Kenya agents joined LG primarily to serve their community, followed closely by earning money, improving their status, learning business skills, and having access to high quality products." Living Goods Stakeholder Report (2013), Pgs 3-4.

• 103.
  Living Goods Monthly CHP Survey (May 2013)
• 104.
  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014
• 105.
  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014
• 106.
  • For example, Living Goods’ Android monitoring system will enable CHPs to log household visits, diagnoses, treatments, pregnancy registrations, and sales. Branches can track this data in real time. The Android data will generally include CHPs’ GPS location and time of data entry. CHPs will also take a photo of each customer and record each customer’s phone number. A combination of such information could be used to verify the plausibility of reported CHP activity.
    • Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014
    • Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise
• 107.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 108.
  Living Goods told us that it may verify the accuracy of CHPs’ reported activity by following up with a random sample of customers at each branch who received treatments or follow ups, had their pregnancies registered, etc. It is still determining the best method for conducting these follow ups. It used to have a call center do such follow up calls, but it received feedback from customers that they found the calls invasive. Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014
• 109.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 110.

  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014

• 111.

  GiveWell spending analysis for Living Goods (November 2014).

• 112.
  Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014
• 113.
  • Molly Christiansen, conversation with GiveWell, November 3, 2014
  • Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise. Not included directly in site visit notes.
• 114.

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, see “Conversations with Sharmin Sharif (Program Manager, Health, BRAC Uganda), Rakib Bhuiyan (Manager of Operations, Health, BRAC Uganda), Edgar Bakadde (Manager of Operations, Health, BRAC Uganda), and Nakigudde Anita (Regional Health Coordinator, BRAC Uganda)”

• 115.

  “

  • Program Assistants:
    • BRAC has roughly one PA per 20 CHPs (i.e., roughly one per branch at BRAC’s current scale)
    • Each month, PAs do field visits with all CHPs in their branches and observe whether CHPs are diagnosing and treating properly. PAs note problems that they observe and provide feedback to CHPs. PAs maintain separate registers for each CHP that include information such as which households they visited and whether there were any problems.
    • Each month, PAs:
      • Visit all pregnant women that were newly registered by their CHPs in order to verify that they exist.
      • Randomly visit at least 3 households per CHP, who received treatment from a CHP, to verify that high-quality care was provided.
      • Visit about 20 households in each CHP’s treatment area per month. PAs visit households systematically so that in 5-6 months they will have visited all of the households that CHPs treat.
      • Produce a monthly performance report on their findings that is submitted to their Area Coordinators (ACs).
    • If a mother has delivered a baby within the last 48 hours, the CHP tells the PA and then they visit the mother together.
  • M&E officer:
    • Currently, an M&E officer who is part of the CHP program also checks a sample of all registered pregnancies and reported treatments each month to verify the accuracy of reported data to provide incentives at the 24 branches on pregnancy, treatment and escorting of severely ill children.
    • This officer also solicits feedback from the household about the quality of CHPs’ care and asks if the treated person has recovered.
    • M&E officers perform these duties at each branch once per month and produce reports on their findings, and based on it, the CHPs receive their incentives. M&E officers’ reports act as a check on CHPs’ and PAs’ reports. At the beginning of the incentive system, these officers’ reports found some over-reporting. Underreporting has been found mostly during field visits by health staff and discussed during monthly refreshers and staff meetings. There appears to be a tendency to record diarrhea treatments and pregnancies that have incentives attached to them while ignoring other treatments and activities.
  • Area Coordinators:
    • Each Area Coordinator (AC) supervises about five branches. Each week, an AC visits two to three branches and joins PAs on their field visits with CHPs and provides feedback. Over the course of 6-7 months, an AC does a field visit with all CHPs at the five branches under their management.
    • ACs also randomly visit households in a CHP’s treatment areas without PAs and CHPs and compare what they learn to what has been recorded in CHPs’ registers.
    • ACs also check the reports that PAs compile about each CHP and note any problems.
    • ACs produce summary reports on all of these activities and submit them to their Regional Coordinators.
  • Regional Coordinators:
    • Each Regional Coordinator (RC) manages about 5 ACs. Each RC also visits 2-3 branches per week and performs a similar role to ACs.
    • RCs record their findings, especially problems, and produce summary reports on them.
  • BRAC monitoring and evaluation (M&E) department:
    • Additionally, a separate BRAC M&E team (from BRAC’s M&E department) monitors activities of CHPs, PAs, ACs and RCs and provides reports on their findings for the program team to review and improve by taking actions. This team aims to check activities of staff and CHPs quarterly.
    • The BRAC audit team also audits all branches at least once per year (it audits the 50 largest BRAC branches twice per year).
      • The audit includes checking that a branch’s stock matches up with BRAC’s records of its purchases and sales, checking for drugs’ expiration dates and drug shortages, reviewing a branch’s financial reports, etc. The audit is primarily based on financial information.
      • The audits have found minor financial problems, such as discrepancies between a branch’s stock and branch sales, cases where a branch sold goods to a CHP on credit and then the CHP migrated without repaying, and overbilling. However, these problems have been reduced significantly over the last two years. BRAC’s new cloud-based debit and credit system and revolving fund provides a strong check on most financial activities
  • Other monitoring information:
    • Program managers are expected to spend about 40% of their time visiting CHPs, but Ms Sharif aims at spending more time visiting CHPs in the field.
    • In the past, BRAC’s monitoring report for its incentives system has caught cases where CHPs over-reported pregnancies. However, this has significantly reduced due to regular checking (by staff, M&E officers) and counseling CHPs that they will only get incentives for the ones that M&E cross-checks. Particular staff and M&E officers can easily indentify such cases of over-reporting. The problem occurred more at the initiation of incentives and now has drastically reduced.
    • Monitoring reports are collected and summarized at each level of the organization and flow up all the way to the BRAC country office. The BRAC country office analyses and summarizes findings from these reports and discusses them at a monthly meeting. It also uses these reports to identify areas to focus for improvement in the subsequent month and to adjust targets.

  ” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 116.

  “Monitoring reports are collected and summarized at each level of the organization and flow up all the way to the BRAC country office. The BRAC country office analyses and summarizes findings from these reports and discusses them at a monthly meeting. It also uses these reports to identify areas to focus for improvement in the subsequent month and to adjust targets.” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 117.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 118.

  “The CHPs said that drug shop owners sometimes buy drugs from CHPs when the owners’ shops run out of drugs. They said that this only occurs once to twice per month (we are not sure if this means once to twice per month in total, or per CHP, or per drug shop). This activity is forbidden by BRAC-LG rules.” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 119.

  “This branch seemed to be running out of deworming pills (albendazole) when we visited. It had one package remaining in its stockroom. However, the branch could put in a requisition for more pills and refill its stock within one or two days.” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 120.

  “Sometimes, they run out of medicines. If the PA is coming to their village soon anyway, she can bring them more supplies. Otherwise, they go to the branch building to restock; they do not wait until the once-per-month refresher training to restock. However, travel to and from the branch typically costs about 5,000 UGX. If they are purchasing a lot of products, they may need to take two motorcycle taxis to get back to their home (and load up the second motorcycle with only supplies).” Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 121.

  "Among Ms. Sharif’s concerns for the BRAC-LG partnership scale-up: ...Strengthening BRAC’s procurement supply chain. Sometimes BRAC branches experience stock-outs, as BRAC currently has just one truck to supply all 128 branches. This is also due to unavailability of the products at source or delay from distributors. Ms. Sharif would like the program to try to reduce the prevalence of these issues." Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014

• 122.
  • Living Goods Product Impact Strategy (2014)
  • Living Goods Customer Savings Survey (February 2014)
• 123.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 124.

  Chuck Slaughter, conversation with GiveWell, July 29, 2014.

• 125.

  Living Goods Draft Cost per Life Saved Methodology. Further detail in Living Goods Draft Cost per Capita Served Methodology.

• 126.

  GiveWell estimate of Living Goods cost effectiveness (November 2014).

• 127.
  • To understand what numbers Living Goods used in its model, we redid the calculations for 2015 and used this process to determine which inputs Living Goods used (some of which were explicit). From this we concluded that, for the total cost of the program, Living Goods used the figure for "Country Net Income" for Living Goods' Uganda program from Living Goods draft budget (2015-2018), rather than a figure for Living Goods' overall budget.
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014.
• 128.

  See GiveWell estimate of Living Goods cost effectiveness (November 2014), Sheets “Jake’s assumptions” and “Natalie’s assumptions.”

• 129.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 130.

  Living Goods’ total budget for 2015-2018 is about $33.27 million. The funding need for partnerships over those years is about $3.27 million and the funding need for “Other (primarily US-based)” costs is about $5.68 million. See Funding need section and GiveWell spending analysis for Living Goods (November 2014) for more details.

• 131.

  World Bank under-5 mortality rate data.

• 132.

  See GiveWell estimate of Living Goods cost effectiveness (November 2014), Sheet “Contamination adjustment (Jake)”.

• 133.

  The cost per life saved estimates listed here are the average of GiveWell estimate of Living Goods cost effectiveness (November 2014), Sheets “Jake’s assumptions” and “Natalie’s assumptions.”

• 134.

  In the cost-effectiveness analysis (GiveWell estimate of Living Goods cost effectiveness (November 2014)), in all Sheets except for “U5MR (Jake’s assumptions),” we use 5q0, or the probability of a child dying before his or her 5th birthday expressed in deaths per 1,000 live births assuming constant mortality rates throughout childhood, instead of the under-5 mortality rate (under 5 deaths per person per year), because the original report on the RCT we received from Living Goods reported outcomes in terms of 5q0. Usually, an approximation of under-5 deaths is estimated by multiplying 5q0 by the number of births in the year. We do not have the number of births in the RCT area, so we multiply 5q0 by the under-5 population (as a proxy for births over a 5 year period) and then divide by 5 to get the deaths per person per year. The more straightforward approach using under-5 mortality rates gives roughly the same result at the levels of child mortality observed in Uganda (see Sheet “U5MR (Jake’s assumptions)”).

• 135.

  Questions for Living Goods on cost effectiveness:

  • What is the % of households with a child under 5 visited by a CHP in the treatment group vs. the control (in both Living Goods' and BRAC's networks)? Currently we only have the % of households visited overall for Living Goods network. If the coverage rates were similar for households with and without children under 5, then the effects found in the RCT seem implausibly large.
  • Living Goods' estimate for number of children under 5 in the villages served by CHPs uses data from Living Goods' network only, derived from the RCT data. We would like to see the same data for the BRAC network: 1) number of households with a child under 5 per village in BRAC villages; 2) number of children under 5 per household in BRAC villages; 3) number of CHPs covering the BRAC villages in the treatment group.
  • How has Living Goods modeled its future costs and number of CHPs in each year?
  • Does BRAC contribute additional resources to its CHP program that Living Goods does not provide?
• Living Goods' estimates of number of children under 5 per CHP only use results from Living Goods' network, rather than incorporating results from BRAC's network. The scale-up that Living Goods is planning for 2015-2018 will add 1.6 BRAC-managed CHPs for every 1 Living Goods CHP, so understanding BRAC's costs and impact is important for understanding future cost effectiveness.
• 136.
  Examples of additional research that could improve the model are:
  • Improving our understanding of why mortality has been decreasing in Uganda and whether it is reasonable to assume that this decline will continue.
  • Adjusting our estimate to account for the exact proportion of marginal resources that are expected to be allocated to BRAC versus Living Goods branches.
  • Perhaps providing a separate replicability adjustment for BRAC’s work.
• 137.
  • See GiveWell estimate of Living Goods cost effectiveness (November 2014), Sheets “Uganda costs only - Jake” and “Uganda costs only - Natalie.”
  • This cost-effectiveness estimate only includes Living Goods’ funding needs for its “Living Goods Uganda” and “BRAC Uganda” programs (from Living Goods draft budget (2015-2018)).
• 138.
  • “Living Goods is looking for a group of funders to scale up its program 5X over the next four years, starting January 1, 2015. It is seeking approximately $10M/year in funding across both its direct network and partner network, which is managed by BRAC. Living Goods is currently supporting 600 agents in 600 villages through BRAC and roughly 400 agents through its direct network. Living Goods is hoping to grow its direct network to about 2500 agents over the next few years.” GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Chuck Slaughter, May 5, 2014.
  • As part of the Living Goods-BRAC scale up plan in Uganda, BRAC plans to gradually convert its remaining 104 branches to Living Goods’ model and to increase the number of CHPs at each of its branches. Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014.
• 139.
  • See Living Goods Scaling Plan (2015-19), Sheet “Business Drivers”
  • Living Goods told us that one of the main limiting factors to the speed of its scale up is its capacity to train new CHPs, but it plans to increase its training capacity over time. Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise.
    • Living Goods told us that it plans to continue to train CHPs in groups that are no larger than 30 and that its existing training capacity is somewhat limited.
    • Living Goods told us that training CHPs is a more substantial bottleneck to scaling than hiring and training branch management staff.
• 140.

  “The product mix will remain largely the same as currently offered, covering health promotion, basic treatments, fortified foods, clean stoves, water filters and solar lights.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 5.

• 141.

  “To expand reach and improve activity levels we will increase the overall density of agents – at BRAC agents per branch will grow to 30-35 on average and at LG branches will expand support 100-120 agents.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 4.

• 142.
  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Bernie Ssebadduka
• 143.

  “New attention to Nutrition: With the aim of driving meaningful reductions in micronutrient deficiency in young children we will test products like micro nutrient powders and fortified porridge, and augment education on balanced diet. We will increase education on exclusive breastfeeding and will offer de-worming treatments. We will provide education and products to improve maternal nutrition in child-bearing years and pre-natal periods. The program will leverage LG’s new fortified food product development, healthy foods from BRAC Uganda’s agriculture program, and some of our partners’ expert guidance on nutrition strategy. LG recently hired the former head of product development and sourcing for Sainsbury UK to help drive new products in this area.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 4.

• 144.

  “BRAC seeks to experiment on improving quality at local health facilities: Data show that obstetrical care at public facilities in Uganda is very weak, leading to high maternal mortality and risks to newborns. Once the core programmatic elements above have been effectively rolled out at the BRAC Uganda branches, BRAC will conduct tests to provide support at under-performing public Health Center 3 facilities near 10 BRAC branches in the form of training, check lists, and protocols around safe delivery.” Living Goods-BRAC Draft Scale Up Concept Note (August 2014), Pg 4.

• 145.

  Notes from GiveWell site visit to Living Goods and BRAC, October 2014, conversation with Alfred Wise.

• 146.

  "LG notes that needs have changed in the 3 years that they've been in Uganda. When they came, bednet coverage was low. Now bednet usages has gone up by a factor of 2 or 3. The street price for the WHO-approved malaria drug was $5-6 for a course when LG arrived and uptake was low. Since they've been there, the Affordable Medicines Facility (AMFm) has brought the price down." GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Chuck Slaughter, July 20, 2012.

• 147.

  World Bank under-5 mortality rate data.

• 148.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 149.
  • Living Goods draft budget (2015-2018). Summarized in GiveWell spending analysis for Living Goods (November 2014).
  • This funding need also includes the need for an additional $3 million in reserves mentioned previously.
• 150.

  Living Goods unaudited financials (2012-2013).

• 151.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014

• 152.

  Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, November 7, 2014

• 153.
  • “Living Goods believes there is a chance it will reach its funding target, but the money has not yet been secured. It is in deep discussions with several current and previous funders who have expressed interest in being part of a syndicate. Meanwhile, Living Goods is looking for new prospects and funders who can make commitments in the seven figures, annually.” GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Chuck Slaughter, May 5, 2014.
  • Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014
• 154.

  Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014.

• 155.
  • Living Goods draft budget (2015-2018). Summarized in GiveWell spending analysis for Living Goods (November 2014).
  • Note: this table does not factor in Living Goods’ need for increased reserves. Since Living Goods is significantly expanding its operations, its overall funding need also includes about $3 million of increased reserves (about $2 million in 2015 and about $1 million in 2016). Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014.
• 156.

  Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, November 24, 2014

• 157.

  Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014

• 158.

  Kenya “Funding Need,” Living Goods budget (2014).

• 159.

  Chuck Slaughter, Brad Presner, Lisa McCandless, conversation with GiveWell, October 1, 2014

• 160.

  Chuck Slaughter, conversation with GiveWell, July 29, 2014.

• 161.

  “We plan to help launch replications of our model in two to four countries in the next three years, with the aim of reaching three to five million people in each country, or a total of over 10 million served.” Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pg 1.

  “We estimate it will cost approximately $10-15 million per country to fund initial implementation and scale up. We seek seed funding of $5 million of co-financing per country for up to three new country CHP platforms – a total commitment of $15 million.” Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pg 2.

• 162.

  “Securing commitment for such a fund up front will increase the odds of attracting the best partners and co-funders, and importantly, speed the process for approving and launching replication sites.” Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pg 2.

• 163.

  Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pgs 3-4.

• 164.

  “Based on the criteria above, countries emerging on our short list of possible priorities include Nigeria, India, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya and Myanmar.” Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pg 4.

• 165.
  • Living Goods Draft Replication Strategy (September 2014), Pgs 6-9.
  • Email from Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President, Brad Presner, Director of Analytics, and Lisa McCandless, Director of Development, Living Goods, October 6, 2014