I work at GOAL 3, a global health organisation developing and scaling IMPALA, a digital health tool for child health in sub-Saharan Africa. My work focuses on partnerships, evidence generation, impact evaluation, and helping promising health innovations move from implementation toward stronger validation and sustainable scale.
Before joining GOAL 3, I worked at GIZ in Brussels and with several smaller NGOs. Alongside my work, I volunteer with Effective Altruism Netherlands as the Global Health and Development group organizer and support the Dutch Geefrevolutie (previously the 10% Club, relatively similar to what GWWC does but then for a Dutch audience).
More broadly, I’m interested in global health, humanitarian wellbeing, conflict-affected settings, displacement, and how we can improve the effectiveness of interventions in complex and resource-constrained environments. I’m particularly interested in questions around evidence, cost-effectiveness, scaling, and how funders should make decisions when the potential impact is high but the evidence is still developing.
Great read, Jack, thanks for sharing your thoughts! And I’m willing to admit I quickly had to look up what “curmudgeonly” means; great word to add to my vocabulary :)
I found the point on RCTs particularly interesting. How do you think donors should approach the “evidence gap” for interventions that have promising real-world evidence, but where generating the next level of evidence (e.g. through a multi-site RCT) might itself cost several million dollars? At what point should funding that evidence generation become part of the philanthropic bet, rather than stronger evidence being a prerequisite for making the bet?
I feel like there’s a potential catch-22 here: donors may wait for gold-standard evidence before funding at scale, while organisations may not be able to generate that evidence without donors willing to take an earlier-stage risk. What does good grantmaking look like in that gap?
Late to the game here, but thank you for sharing Nick! I will be honest in saying that, until now, I have been quite the lurker on EA forum and reading GHD-related posts, but have had a tendency not to 'dare' put my thoughts out there in response. This is partially out of self-consciousness related reasons, and partially as I have indeed felt that the EA forum has moved away from GHD to AI/Animal Welfare, and it didn't always feel like the right place to put my thoughts on here. Big however, I agree that the decline in GHD discussion is quite sad and I just wanted to comment here to keep myself accountable to not become a part of the problem :) I'll be posting and commenting more and also just wanted to put an appreciation out there for everyone else who is active on this forum!