Evidence Action

Evidence Action is a global health organisation that takes interventions already proven to work and delivers them at national scale, largely through government systems, in Africa and Asia. It describes its focus as low-cost solutions to health problems that are preventable or treatable but neglected in global health funding, including intestinal worm infection, unsafe drinking water, maternal anaemia and untreated syphilis in pregnancy. The organisation states that everything it does is based on evidence and data, that it only implements solutions known to work, and that it selects for the largest health gain per dollar spent. Its model is less about inventing new interventions than about closing the gap between what randomised evidence shows and what actually reaches households and clinics. In India it works with state governments on programmes covering deworming, safe water and prenatal supplementation. It positions itself as one of the more transparent and heavily evaluated charities in the sector.

Headquarters: Washington, DC, United States

Major Areas of Work

• Child health and nutrition: Mass treatment for parasitic worm infection and other interventions that improve school attendance, growth and long-term earnings for children.

• Safe drinking water: Chlorination of water at the point of collection and within piped supply systems, to cut childhood diarrhoeal disease.

• Maternal and newborn health: Prenatal supplementation, screening in pregnancy and delivery of proven newborn care practices through public health facilities.

• Evidence to scale: Identifying interventions with strong randomised evidence but weak delivery, then testing whether they can be run affordably at population scale.

• Government systems delivery: Working inside state and national health and education systems so that programmes run on public infrastructure rather than parallel structures.

Major Initiatives and Programmes

• Deworm the World: Supports governments to run school-based mass deworming for children at risk of intestinal worm infection, one of the most widely cited cost-effective health programmes in the sector.

• Safe Water Now: Installs and maintains chlorine dispensers at water collection points and supports in-line chlorination of piped supply, so treated water is the default rather than a household decision.

• Syphilis-Free Start: Expands dual HIV and syphilis testing and treatment in antenatal care to prevent congenital syphilis.

• Equal Vitamin Access: Strengthens supply and delivery of iron and folic acid supplementation for pregnant women through routine antenatal services.

• Accelerator: The internal pipeline that screens promising interventions, adapts them from trial conditions to real-world delivery, and decides which ones are worth scaling.

The Accelerator is the mechanism that keeps the rest of the portfolio moving. Rather than committing to a fixed set of programmes, it runs a structured search across candidate interventions with credible evidence, tests delivery and cost assumptions in real settings, and either advances an intervention toward scale or stops it. Syphilis-Free Start and Equal Vitamin Access both came through this route.

Impact

Evidence Action states that its interventions have reached 530 million people globally, that its deworming work has generated 23 billion dollars in productivity gains, and that its programmes have saved more than 16,000 lives of children under five. It lists GiveWell, The Life You Can Save, Founders Pledge, Giving What We Can and Giving Multiplier among the funders and evaluators that recommend it, and cites a four-star Charity Navigator rating and a Candid platinum transparency seal.

Leadership

• Kanika Bahl, Chief Executive Officer

• Cammie Lee, Executive Vice President, Global Programs

This suits people who want their work measured. The organisation is built around cost-effectiveness evidence, so roles carry real accountability for reach, unit cost and delivery quality rather than for activity. Work happens inside government health and education systems, which means exposure to state-level programme design, supply chains, monitoring and the practical politics of scale. It fits people with a research, public health, monitoring and evaluation, supply chain or government partnership background who are comfortable being held to numbers, and who would rather scale something already proven than pilot something new.