If you’ve got some extra money and want to benefit humanity,
a pretty good way to do it is to try to use that cash to fund interventions that help save lives.
But there are lots of different interventions out there that stop people from dying;
how can you decide which to spend your money on? Welcome to MinuteEarth.
Say you’re trying to save as many people as possible with the money you have;
it's pretty simple to figure out how cost efficient a particular intervention is.
First, figure out how many people die in a given area during a given time period with
no intervention. Then add the intervention, and measure the death rate again to see how
many lives the intervention saved. Then divide the cost of the intervention by the lives saved
to figure out the cost of saving a single life. And what we find - other than the fact that this
is a pretty cold and un-nuanced way to think about human lives - is that it’s way more
cost-effective to intervene earlier than later; encouraging people not to smoke, for example,
is much less expensive than paying for their lung transplants down the line.
That’s not to say early interventions are super cheap; they often need to be repeated
again and again and target lots of people - only some of which would have otherwise
died - which bumps up the cost for each life actually saved. But these early interventions
are just so much simpler - and therefore so much less expensive - than later life-saving
efforts. And there are tons of different early, super-cost-effective interventions, like giving
mosquito nets to people in malaria-prone areas and - one of my favorites - just giving cash to
poor people so they can take care of their own basic needs. And at the very top of the pile,
the cheapest way to save a life is to give people in certain areas capsules of vitamin A.
Most people's diet provides all the vitamin A their body needs to do things
like process low levels of light, release energy into the bloodstream, and help immune cells
differentiate into various infection-fighting cells. But since the vitamin A in some foods is
harder to metabolize than others, people that eat mostly veggies and nuts - and little meat
or fortified foods - may end up deficient. And that causes all sorts of problems, like diarrhea,
blindness, and bad cases of measles. An estimated 200 million people - mostly in places like
sub-saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent - have vitamin A deficiency, and 200,000 of them
die every year as a result – more people than die worldwide from drug overdoses and warfare.
Luckily, though, Vitamin A deficiency is also one of the easiest problems to prevent.
Capsules full of easily-metabolized vitamin A are a snap to produce, don’t need to be refrigerated,
and can be easily distributed - all for about a dollar a piece. One study found that - in
certain areas with high levels of deaths due to vitamin A deficiency - every quarter of a million
dollars or so spent on Vitamin A distribution saved almost 100 lives. Put all of that math
together, and every $2,795 donated to Vitamin A interventions prevents someone from dying.
And that means that while there are many many ways to help make a difference in the world, when it
comes to cost-effective lifesaving, spending money on vitamin A is a pretty sweet pill to swallow.
At MinuteEarth, we LOVE digging into the data, and a lot of the data in this video
came from the work of this video's sponsor, GiveWell. GiveWell’s mission is to research
the effectiveness of various charities in order to help people make more informed giving choices.
Their Maximum Impact Fund sends money directly - and with no fees - to charities that are best
positioned to help save lives at any given moment. This year, that fund sent more than $10 million
to Helen Keller International, which provides Vitamin A supplements to children under age 5.
In other words, donors to that fund will help save more than 3,500 lives in 2021 alone. Right now,
first-time donors to Helen Keller International or any of GiveWell’s other top rated charities will
have their donations matched dollar-for-dollar up to $250. Click on the link below to donate,
and use the fundraiser code minuteearth at checkout to make sure your donation gets matched.