CEARCH: My organization CEARCH (https://exploratory-altruism.org/) is an EA organization incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship; we do cause prioritization research in GHD/longtermism/meta to find cost-effective new ideas, and then work with other EA organizations and grantmakers to provide more funding and talent in support of these ideas.

Importance of NCD prevention: In global health, our research suggests that combating NCDs via policy advocacy (e.g. preventing hypertension through WHO-recommended policies for reducing sodium consumption, or preventing type 2 diabetes through taxing soda) is highly cost-effective – probably at least 10x GiveWell in expectation, but obviously much more risky (n.b. our full report on hypertension is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R2ul47NtD-dJ7D7rcHFZ0z7h0JqcFxK_/view & our full report on diabetes is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UrYZUGbLn5LeTRVRZYdiY2EorsmXxQwR/view).

The high cost-effectiveness driven by two main factors: (i) The fact that the NCD burden in poor countries is rapidly increasingly as they get richer and diets/exercise habits get worse (in contrast to traditional infectious diseases where the DALY burden declines as sanitation/nutrition/access to healthcare improve). (ii) While policy advocacy is risky and may not succeed, the track record of the charities we’ve examined is decent, and the scale of impact as well as the lower counterfactual cost of government spending (relative to EA money) makes it very cost-effective in expectation.

And beyond raw cost-effectiveness analysis (which can be wrong!), these ideas look good on more qualitative considerations: (a) the scientific evidence (e.g. on the link between sodium and cardiovascular disease outcomes, and between the impact of WHO-recommended policies and sodium consumption) is very solid; (b) experts unanimously recommend these preventive policies; and (c) based on the moral weights surveys we ran, the intangible downside of lower freedom of choice as a result of these regulatory/fiscal interventions is outweighed by the health benefits.

How the money is likely to be spent: Founders Pledge has been considering a large multi-million grant in this area, and commissioned us to evaluate some of the larger global health policy NGOs working on salt. However, we have also evaluated smaller NGOs capable of absorbing more in the region of USD 100k-300k. ACX has provided us a regranting budget of USD 100k, and that money - as well as any additional money raised here - will go towards supporting them (90% confidence; remaining uncertainty comes from whether we will raise enough money from other sources such that funding here becomes superfluous; we think that quite unlikely)