Comments
First Embrace is a great name choice
This is very exciting! In general, what are the funding needs of these organizations? I know I could ask them directly, but I was wondering - in general, do the charities that come out of Charity Entrepreneurship already have the funding they need to get started?
Kind of relatedly, I was just on the site of an older Charity Entrepreneurship organization, LEEP, and I noticed that they have a note there saying that they're fully funded and that most individual donors should look to other high-impact giving opportunities. I already loved LEEP, but I thought this clarity was awesome and made them seem even more trustworthy.
Nice re LEEP's honesty (and being well-funded)!
My understanding is that at the end of the CE program, founders are given the opportunity to pitch a set of known regular CE donors for funding, and that most incubated charities get enough money for their first ~year of operations from that. See https://www.seednetworkfunders.com/ for more, seems like it is minimum $10k/year to join this group of donors.
We are thrilled to introduce four new charities from our latest Charity Entrepreneurship incubation round! Collectively, they have secured $696,000 in seed funding to kickstart their ventures.
Read on to learn more about these newly incubated organisations and how you can support their impact journeys!
Over 2 million babies die every year. That’s 4 babies every minute. 80% of these are low-birth-weight (LBW) newborns. We can change this. Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) increases an LBW newborn’s chance of survival by at least 33%.
First Embrace will establish KMC wards within existing hospitals, training and equipping nurses to support mothers in practices proven in over 20 RCTs to save newborn lives: skin-to-skin contact, exclusive breastfeeding, and danger-sign identification.
Half a billion smallholder farmers grow a third of the world’s food, yet most live in extreme poverty. Proven tools like water tanks and storage bags can increase farm incomes for years, but lenders often misjudge smallholders’ risk, leaving a $170 billion finance gap.
Better Season Project is closing that gap by making productive investments affordable for smallholder farmers. We achieve this through asset-collateralised loans (ACLs), where the asset itself serves as collateral, lowering barriers to credit, reducing lender risk, and creating stable pathways to higher income. Working with Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs) in Kenya, we provide technical advice, monitoring, and enable farmer adoption. Our goal is to establish a fair, scalable, and self-sustaining model of smallholder finance, enabling early philanthropy to unlock lasting income growth.
Every year, an estimated 200,000 women and 1 million newborns die from preventable pregnancy-related complications in Africa. In over 70% of cases, the issue is not the absence of healthcare, but the delay in reaching it.
Opal Health addresses this gap by implementing Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), a group-based intervention that brings women and their families together to identify their barriers to care and develop practical, low-cost solutions. Multiple studies have shown that PLA can reduce maternal and neonatal deaths by up to 49%, with cost-effectiveness estimates roughly 5–10 times stronger than those of direct cash transfers. Opal Health works through government systems to bring this evidence-backed model to hard-to-reach communities in East Africa, maximising the lives saved per dollar spent.
1 in 10 people live on under $3 a day. Livelihood programs – initiatives that enable people to increase their income and consumption – can change that. Yet, effectiveness-minded donors who want to give to livelihood programs often lack information on which charities have the highest impact.
Better Futures Guide will fill this gap by becoming a dedicated livelihoods evaluator. We’ll synthesize research to identify high-impact livelihoods charities and then publish our recommendations for livelihoods-focused donors.
For a world where no baby dies preventably.
Cofounders: Dr Wesley Quadros & Ikra Gulzar
Over 2 million babies die every year. That’s 4 every minute. 80% of these are low birth weight (LBW) newborns. 75% of neonatal deaths are in the first week of life. We can change this. Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) increases a newborn’s chance of survival by 33%. We will establish dedicated KC wards within existing hospitals, training and equipping nurses to support mothers in KMC practices proven to save newborn lives: skin-to-skin contact, exclusive breastfeeding, and danger-sign identification. We will hyper-focus on cost-effectiveness whilst tailoring the program to local context for rapid government adoption and scale.
In our first year, we will pilot hospital-based KMC to provide life-saving care to 600 newborns, refine the model and establish government partnerships. Long term, we will work to integrate KC into the national health system to as the standard of care for LBW newborns in Nigeria, in practice.
Nigeria accounts for 11% of newborn deaths worldwide, with a neonatal mortality rate of 4% - the second highest burden globally. Whilst data is extremely limited, desk research suggests LBW mortality risk may be as high as 30% in Nigeria. We will work in Kano State, the second most populous state in the country. We will target hospitals with a large treatment gap for KMC and high number of births.
Our goal is to deliver effective KMC to at least 80% of babies enrolled in each of the hospitals we work in, before scaling to the next. In Year 1 we project saving 156 lives for $1,536 each with a DALY averted for $23, both well over 10x Givewell’s bar. At scale, this rises to over 500 newborns saved annually. We aim to deliver a KC model ready for national integration whilst generating evidence on cost-effectiveness and acceptability to justify subsequent scale-up. We will also test the local effectiveness of innovations to increase effect size such as maternal peer groups and behaviour change technical support.
We’re currently looking for connections in the KMC and newborn health space and potential implementation partners in Nigeria to help shape and scale this intervention. We are also looking for technical support for our digital M&E system. If you are connected to anyone who would be useful for us to speak to or have experience in any of the above or adjacent areas then we’d love to hear from you!
Learn moreHelping smallholder farmers increase their incomes through proven, productive tools.
Co-founders: Kristina Mahony and William Lawless
Millions of farmers are excluded from accessing simple, evidence-backed tools that lift incomes for years. Many could afford these assets on credit, but lenders misjudge their risk, leaving a $170 billion gap in smallholder finance. Asset-collateralised loans (ACLs) offer a solution: credit where the asset itself serves as collateral, removing traditional barriers like land titles, guarantors, or high deposits. When structured well, ACLs allow farmers to invest in tools that reliably increase income while giving lenders a profitable new income stream and protection against defaults. Evidence from Kenya shows ACLs for water tanks raised monthly milk sales by 15-67% and achieved repayment rates of 99.3%. Traditional lenders largely avoid this segment altogether, and even SACCOs that do serve these farmers rarely offer ACLs. Liquidity constraints make them risk averse, and high transaction costs on small loans limit the viability of new products. This is a credit market failure: farmers who could reliably repay are unable to access credit, while lenders who could profitably serve them lack the systems and information to do so.
Better Season Project acts as a technical partner to Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs) addressing both sides of this market. SACCOs are member-owned financial cooperatives that pool member savings and use them to issue loans, typically at capped or member-approved interest rates. On the supply side, we help SACCOs design, pilot and monitor ACLs. On the demand side, we support farmers through outreach that explains the costs, benefits, and obligations of ACLs, and provide ongoing support during repayment, such as flexible repayment options that better match income patterns across seasons.
Our first focus is on expanding access to water tanks for dairy farmers. Water tanks address one of the most significant constraints in dairy production: reliable access to clean water. They are a durable, income-boosting asset, with evidence showing they can increase milk sales by more than 15% and raise household income for over a decade. The biggest uncertainty in our Theory of Change is the level of support required to get a SACCO to provide ACLs profitably. Our initial priority is diagnosis: understanding each SACCO’s constraints, the unit economics that make ACLs viable, internal operations and risk assessment by supporting up to eight SACCOs through their first ACL disbursements. We hope to identify the minimum assistance required for SACCOs to disburse ACLs consistently for a cost-effective scale-up.
We have chosen to operate in Kenya, across several counties in the Rift Valley. Kenya is home to 1.8 million smallholder dairy farmers and experiences recurring periods of low rainfall, making reliable water access a persistent constraint on production. Currently, 76% of rural households lack consistent access to water. Kenya also has a dense network of SACCOs and dairy cooperatives, with 70% of marketed milk coming from co-ops. Repayment through milk deliveries is also relatively more tractable due to the widespread use of mobile money.
Our goal is to deliver a model that achieves $12 per income doubling, or about $30 per DALY-equivalent. Over time, we hope not to exist: if we can demonstrate that ACLs are profitable, low-risk, and beneficial to members, SACCOs should adopt the model independently, hopefully enabling widespread uptake without ongoing external support.
We would value connections or advice from people with experience in: financial inclusion in Kenya or other parts of East Africa; working with SACCOs or dairy cooperatives; or interventions that increase smallholder farmer incomes (e.g. agricultural extension, access to inputs, AI-based weather or yield prediction, or parametric micro insurance).
We would also welcome guidance on medium to long term funding pathways, especially across livelihood interventions, climate resilience, water access, and financial inclusion.
Learn moreCommunity action for safer births
Co-founders: Matt Beer & Melissa Kaminker
Every year, an estimated 200,000 women and 1 million newborns die from preventable causes in sub-Saharan Africa. After decades of improvement, progress on maternal and neonatal mortality has stalled and, in some contexts, is reversing. The leading causes of death – haemorrhage, hypertension, sepsis, birth asphyxia, and neonatal infections – are all treatable when care is accessed on time. The core constraint is not the absence of facilities, but the delays involved in deciding to seek care and then reaching it. This is the problem that Opal Health addresses.
Conventional, top-down health messaging has limited impact in rural settings because communities face fundamentally different constraints. One village may be several hours from the nearest health centre; another may contend with high malaria prevalence; another may struggle with cultural distrust in medical services. A one-fit-all solution cannot address these unique barriers.
What works is giving communities the tools to understand the specific drivers of morbidity, to discuss the specific barriers they face, and to implement solutions they design, sustain and own.
We establish Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) groups across rural Uganda focused on maternal and neonatal health. This is a tested methodology that has been shown to reduce maternal mortality by 49% and neonatal by 33%. It achieves this at high cost-effectiveness because the solutions are generated and maintained by communities, not externally delivered.
PLA involves training existing community health workers to convene and facilitate monthly group sessions focused on maternal and newborn health. Women of reproductive age and family members examine the causes of poor health outcomes in their village, prioritise the barriers they can address, and design feasible, low-cost strategies. These may include forming a small savings fund for emergency transport, strengthening hygiene practices to prevent neonatal sepsis, or organising peer-support systems to encourage early ANC attendance.
We work directly with governments as an implementing partner to embed PLA within existing health systems, designing it for scale from the outset. We train frontline community health workers in hard to reach areas to facilitate PLA groups, provide quality assurance, and collect community-level data to strengthen visibility and decision-making. This alignment ensures PLA reaches the hardest-to-serve communities while maintaining a low cost per life saved.
We have completed a feasibility study in Uganda and anticipate launching a pilot programme in its Eastern region. Our goals for the next 12 months include:
We are excited to test a version of PLA that is more cost-effective than previous implementations and designed from the outset to integrate seamlessly into government systems.
Identifying what works to improve livelihoods and reduce poverty
Co-founders: Rens Bakker and Elizabeth Weissberg
1 in 10 people live on under $3 a day. Evidence-based livelihood programs – initiatives that enable people to increase their income and consumption – can change that. Yet billions are spent every year on ineffective programs.
In other sectors, charity evaluators – like GiveWell, Giving Green, and Animal Charity Evaluators – have helped donors direct hundreds of millions to high-impact charities. However, there’s no dedicated evaluator for donors who want to give to livelihood charities. As a result, donors whose values don’t fully align with existing evaluators are left to build homegrown models, adapt research from evaluators with different priorities, or simply give based on intuition.
A successful livelihoods evaluator could, in time, not only move money to high impact charities, but also – like GiveWell has started to do for health – shift sector norms towards cost-effectiveness.
Our evaluator will reflect the values of impact-oriented donors who are dedicated to funding livelihood interventions. We’ll help them turn their priorities – like sustainable income growth, innovation, and agency – into high-impact giving.
We’ll work alongside evaluators like GiveWell, Giving Green, and Animal Charity Evaluators to ensure a diverse range of donors is well-served and highest-impact nonprofits receive much-needed funding.
Similar evaluators have moved an average of $200,000 in year 1 and $10M by year 5 through a combination of robust research, donor outreach, successful stakeholder networking, and targeted comms. Given the roadmaps these evaluators have created, along with their already generous collaboration with us, our goal is to meet or exceed directing this much money in our first five years, a large share of it counterfactual.
To support our efforts, we’re seeking:
All of these sound super exciting. Small note- the website for First Embrace is pretty scrappy-feeling and there's a reasonable number of spelling/grammar issues which, were I not already familiar with AIM's work, would (?unfairly) make me less confident in the charity itself.
Examples:
I appreciate that I might be unusually sensitive to this kind of thing but seems like an easy win to me :) excited to see more of your work!
thank you Joseph, I've resolved these.
I like the first 2 of your examples actually, but the next 3 are bad yes.
I think Joseph is pointing out the 's in the first example, the added "the" in the second
gotcha it's the grammar fair...