Charity Entrepreneurship co-founded Charity Science Health in 2016, and helped launch Suvita through our 2019 Incubation Program. Today we’re proud to announce that the two organizations are joining forces to form a COVID-19 response team, in collaboration with Dr. Sebastian Bauhoff of Harvard and his research team.
The pandemic crisis forced us to choose between pause and pivot. We chose to pivot. We are repurposing our core expertise in order to support state governments with behavioural nudges, explains Varsha Venugopal, Suvita’s co-founder.
Working with policymakers in India, the response team will channel their skills and resources into encouraging behavior change to reduce COVID-19 transmission. Click here to support their work. The team brings together expertise in diverse spaces including health economics, behavior change, mass communications, and data analysis. With a database of 300,000 program users and connections to multiple state governments, the response team is uniquely positioned to support the effort to contain COVID-19. The team’s five-part plan of action emphasizes community outreach and mobilization to reduce COVID-19 transmission. They will:
Send SMS texts and voice calls to low-income communities to provide information and encourage behavior change.
Send SMS texts with instructions and nudges to community health workers.
Use phone surveys to investigate knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors toward COVID-19.
Optimize the timing, content, and frequency of messages through adaptive testing, sharing their findings in real time to inform mass messaging projects elsewhere in India.
Use these insights to improve the effectiveness of mass messaging for immunizations going forward.
The response team’s strategies will evolve as the crisis develops, so make sure to follow their latest updates by subscribing to their newsletter on their website. So far they expect to reach as many as 10 million people in low-income communities and 70,000 community health workers. Currently, they’re working on building partnerships to further increase their reach. If you’d like to help out, the response team is looking to:
expand their capacity for rapid remote surveys
find existing data on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors surrounding COVID-19 in India
build more contacts in state and central governments in India
You can also donate to the response team here:
We’re hugely proud of all our incubatees, and want to take the opportunity to congratulate Suvita and Charity Science Health for taking such bold action to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. We wish them and Dr. Bauhoff’s team all the best in their partnership and future collaborations!
For more information about the response team, read the official announcement here.
Suvita's & CSH's team working remotely :)