What problem is Suvita working on?

In 2023, there were over 22.2 million children globally who missed out on at least one vaccination before their first birthday. And even though India's overall vaccination rates are relatively strong, the country's vast population means that a significant number of these undervaccinated children live in India.

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 successfully delivered 73.6 million SMS reminders to families and pregnant women. It has recruited more than 14,100 community influencers across two states, reaching the caregivers of 1.5% of the world’s children born yearly.

What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Suvita?^1.

Founders Pledge recommends Suvita
In 2023, GiveWell made a grant to its programs in Bihar and Maharashtra and highlighted the cost-effectiveness of these programs. (Note that this cost-effectiveness estimate is specific to Suvita's work in Bihar and Maharashtra at the time the grant was made.)

We previously included Suvita as one of our recommended charities because the impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge highlighted its cost-effectiveness in its 2022 Global Health & Development Fund grant report.

We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our evaluator investigations and decided to rely on; 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.