TL;DR
HealthLearn provides accredited, engaging, mobile-optimized online courses for health workers in Nigeria and Uganda. We focus on lifesaving clinical skills that are simple to implement.
Our recent evaluation of the HealthLearn Newborn Care Foundations course showed significant improvements in birth attendants’ clinical practices and key birth outcomes. Early initiation of breastfeeding, strongly linked to reduced newborn mortality, improved significantly in the evaluation.
After applying large (>10X) discounts, we estimate the course is ~24 times more cost-effective than GiveWell’s cash transfer benchmark. We are uncertain about the precise magnitude of impact, but a sensitivity analysis suggests that the program is cost-effective under a wide range of plausible scenarios.
Our already-low unit costs should decline as we scale up. This is likely to increase or at least maintain the program’s cost-effectiveness, even if the impact per trainee is lower than our current point estimate. We also earn revenue by hosting courses for another NGO, which covers a portion of our core team costs and increases cost-effectiveness per philanthropic dollar spent.
We have identified key uncertainties in evidence strength, sustainability of clinical practice change, and intervention reach. We plan to improve our monitoring and evaluation to assess these uncertainties and develop more precise estimates of impact per trainee. We will continue our work to improve and scale up the Newborn Care Foundations course, while also developing new courses addressing other gaps in clinical practices where impactful interventions are needed.
Background
HealthLearn is an AIM-incubated nonprofit that develops and provides engaging, accredited, case-based, mobile-optimized online courses for health workers (HWs) in Nigeria and Uganda. This includes one HealthLearn course (Newborn Care Foundations) and two courses (focused on epidemic preparedness and hypertension diagnosis and management) f