💡 What are we building?
The Agency Fund is a multi-donor initiative investing in ideas and organizations that help people navigate toward a better future.
🚀 Opportunities
- We’ve extended the deadline for our next open call for proposals to September 29th, 2023. Visit https://agency.fund/calls for details and please share widely.
- The Fast Forward Startup Accelerator offers a $25,000 grant and mentorship to early-stage tech nonprofit entrepreneurs. Apply by September 30th, 2023.
- Check out these job opportunities from Agency Fund partners:
- Noora Health is hiring for Program, Monitoring & Evaluation, and Engineering roles across Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia. All current openings can be found on their website.
- Family Empowerment Media is hiring for a French-speaking Project Director to help launch work in three new countries. Learn more and apply here.
- OGOW Health are hiring a Data Science & Analytics Lead to drive continuous learning for improved health outcomes in their work. Learn more and apply on their website.
- Involve Learning Solutions is hiring for Operations, Design, and Communications roles. Learn more and apply here.
🙌 Highlights
This month we launched the 2023 Chat for Impact Accelerator in partnership with turn.io and WhatsApp. Over six weeks, leaders from 10 organizations will receive coaching on behavioral science, measuring impact, and responsible AI to strengthen their chat services and improve health outcomes. Learn more about the program and participants here.
As always, here are a few highlights from our amazing partner organizations:
- Movva has built a personalized digital support system for college students. In a randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 2,320 first-year students in Brazil, they find that engaging with Movva content reduced dropouts by 19.5%. They are working to support an additional 13,000 students this month.
- The Taimaka Project has been testing tailored messages for caregivers of children in malnutrition treatment programs to reduce dropout rates. Preliminary results from their RCT in Nigeria suggest dropouts have dropped to 3%, from 28% last year, potentially due to a recently deployed automated voice call intervention.
- RocketLearning has expanded their program to 8 new districts across Rajasthan, India. Through this growth they will equip more than 50,000 parents and care-givers with the digital tools, community, and motivation to be their childrens' first teachers.
- Shujaaz's #PeacePekee (Only Peace) campaign has been awarded the iF social impact prize. The multimedia campaign reached 7.7 million youth across Kenya through comics, in-person events, and social media that supported them to be peace ambassadors during Kenya's 2022 elections.
📚 What We’re Reading
This month we dug into two articles that explore the impacts of access to better schools and considered problems with gating mechanisms in education, the use of regression discontinuity to estimate treatment effects when randomization is unfeasible, and the impact of peer comparisons on students’ educational trajectories.
Have an agency-related article you think we should be reading? Please send us recommendations to hawa@agency.fund.