We care about impact per dollar, so that we can save as many lives as possible.
Our Cost-Effective Impact
$94
Cost-Per-Child
As compared to legacy models, which cost $251+ per child treated. Being 50%+ cheaper allows us to reach 2x the number of children.
$1,583 - $4,414
Cost-Per-Life Saved
We define a life saved as treating a child that would have died without Taimaka’s program. We estimate this using several statistical methods.
Read our latest update on how we do this here.
12,000+
Children Treated
Demonstrating our high-quality care across thousands of patients out of existing government clinics in Gombe State, Nigeria.
How much does it cost to save a life?
Treating a child for malnutrition is relatively inexpensive ($94), so it might be surprising to hear that it costs much more to save a life.
Delivering malnutrition treatment costs us <$100, but many of the children that receive it thankfully would not have died without treatment. This means that we have to reach enough of the sickest children to stop deaths that would have occurred if we had not provided treatment. Read more about the cost of saving a life from charity evaluator, GiveWell, here.
How We Evaluate Our Work
We use cost-effectiveness modeling to rigorously measure our impact. At its core, a cost-effectiveness calculation is just a fraction: the amount of ‘good’ created, divided by the cost of creating that impact. Calculating how much it costs us to treat a child and, ultimately, save a life, allows us to benchmark ourselves against the most impactful interventions in the world.
We use our live data to track outcomes like child recovery.
We use our in-house digital case management database to track outcomes for every single child in our program. This data allow us to track 200+ data points on each child in real-time.
We track child recovery through anthropometrics (e.g., weight gain) and clinical indicators (e.g., absence of co-morbidities).
Then, we plug our data into a cost-effectiveness model to assess our impact.
We plug our cost and performance data into a modified version of charity evaluator, GiveWell’s, model of malnutrition treatment to estimate our impact. We calculate that our improved treatment program is 20x as cost-effective as cash transfers, and saves a life for <$2,000.
Read our latest update on estimating the number of lives we save here.
Don’t just take our word for it. Founder’s Pledge recommends us as one of the most impactful organizations in the world.
Founder’s Pledge, a charity evaluator, has conducted an external evaluation of Taimaka’s work and permanently recommended us as a top giving opportunity in Global Health and Development (GHD).
What’s Next?
Growth
Over the next three years, we’ll expand our program to two new Nigerian states. This expansion will allow us to treat 50,000 of the sickest children in the world, while proving our model over a wider geographic area. We’ll expand by building our current partnership with a Nigerian state government, where we work out of existing government healthcare facilities.
Scale
Over the next five years, we’ll build the foundation to scale our model by transforming existing government programs. Governments in Nigeria and beyond already treat 13.7 million cases of acute malnutrition every year using outdated approaches. We’re planning to transform existing government programs with digitally-enabled community health workers (CHWs) and simpler protocols to reach two million+ more children.