Suvita
Childhood Immunisation Campaigns
Suvita sends text message reminders to caregivers in India to remind them to get their children vaccinated. It also builds a network of ambassadors who share information with new parents in their community about local vaccine clinics.
What problem is Suvita working on?
Globally, one child dies every minute from a vaccine-preventable disease. This is because 19 million children fail to receive their basic vaccinations before their first birthday each year.
Vaccination coverage varies widely between and within countries, so certain regions bear a much greater load than others when it comes to vaccine-preventable diseases. Half of the world’s undervaccinated children are in India, despite India’s early contributions to vaccine research and development, its current position as a leading global producer of vaccines, and significant progress in strengthening vaccine supply over recent years due to government investment.
What does Suvita do?
Suvita’s mission is to “work towards a world in which every child has access to their basic vaccinations."
To achieve, this, Suvita:
- Works with local NGOs, health centres, and the state government to send text message reminders to bring infants to free, government-provided vaccination clinics.
- Invites opinion leaders to be immunisation ambassadors, and keeps them updated with details of local monthly immunisation clinics.
Suvita reports having sent SMS reminders to over 200,000 caregivers across seven states in India.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Suvita?
We previously included Suvita as one of our recommended charities because the impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge highlighted its cost-effectiveness in its grant report. We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations; while we expect to soon look into Founders Pledge as part of this more in-depth evaluator research, we haven’t yet. As such, we don't currently include Suvita as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.