At The Life You Can Save, our mission is simple but ambitious: to improve as many lives as possible, as effectively as possible. When it comes to health, that means using a clear, evidence-based framework to decide where to focus our efforts and which organizations to support.
Starting with the Problem: What are the biggest challenges to tackle?
The first step in our evaluation framework is understanding which health issues are affecting people at scale. We start by looking at the global burden of disease—specifically, the leading causes of mortality and morbidity. This helps us identify the health conditions that are not only deadly, but also disabling, keeping people from living full, productive lives.
We review this information by country and region, using high-quality datasets like the Global Burden of Disease study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). By analyzing which health conditions are having the greatest impact in different places, we can prioritize the problems that are both widespread and severe.
In many low-income countries, this often includes:
- Infectious diseases, particularly malaria
- Neonatal complications and newborn ill health
- Malnutrition, which not only causes direct harm but also exacerbates the effects of other diseases such as diarrhea and malaria
- Lack of immunization, leaving communities vulnerable to preventable diseases
Once we identify these priority issues, we move to the next step: finding proven, cost-effective interventions that can address them.
Focusing on effective solutions: What Interventions should we prioritize?
We seek interventions that don’t just respond to illness, but actively prevent it. Our focus is on solutions that can deliver proven health benefits at low cost, particularly those that:
- Generate demand for health services and encourage behavior change
- Improve the supply of care, especially in hard-to-reach or underserved communities
Here are some of the key types of interventions and the organizations we support in each category:
1. Supply of care and medication
Working on the supply of quality healthcare and access to medication is a key component of our work. Across the areas outlined above (malnutrition, infectious disease, primary heathcare provision) we support a number of organizations that implement evidence-based interventions to increase supply.
Malaria is a leading cause of death and illness in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. We support organizations providing tools that help communities prevent infection in the first place. Among the most impactful interventions to address malaria are the provision of insecticide treated nets and Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC).
Among our recommended charities, Against Malaria Foundation distributes long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets and Malaria Consortium implements seasonal malaria chemoprevention, offering preventative treatment during high-risk months for young children.
While malnutrition does not always appear on lists of leading causes of death, a malnourish child is much more vulnerable to being severely affected by infectious disease or other health complications, often leading to death. Malnutrition contributes to the severity of many diseases and stunts children’s growth and development.
In our work, we support two different models to address malnutrition. The first is Sanku’s supports small-scale millers to add essential micronutrients to flour, an approach that leverages local markets where people source their food. The second is a more classic delivery of vitamin A supplementation through Helen Keller International, a highly cost-effective international NGO.
Many of the most vulnerable communities live in remote or under-served areas, where access to even basic healthcare remains limited. Bringing essential health services closer to these populations can prevent countless cases of illness and death, especially among children. Charities on our list take a variety of approaches.
However, one of the most common interventions is the coordination and support of Community Health Workers. Both Living Goods and Malaria Consortium addressing the challenge of lack of access to healthcare by training and supporting community health workers who go door-to-door, offering primary care and health education to families in hard-to-reach areas.
2. Demand generation and behaviour change
Delivering health products and services is not enough—people must also be informed, motivated, and empowered to use them. Demand generation and behavior change interventions help bridge this gap by fostering awareness and shifting norms. Development Media International (DMI) leverages mass media campaigns to promote healthy behaviors and encourage timely care-seeking.
Another strategy to drive uptake of positive health behaviour is the approach taken by New Incentives. New Incentives works in Nigeria to increase childhood immunization rates by providing small cash transfers to caregivers, a highly cost-effective approach that boosts vaccine uptake and protects children from deadly diseases.
We also support Breakthrough Trust and CEDOVIP, organizations working at the intersection of public health and gender equity, addressing harmful social norms and supporting communities to become safer and healthier places for all.
Measuring What Matters: Using DALYs to Estimate Impact
The overall impact of Life You Can Save’s money raised for our Health fund is calculated using DALYs. This is what we report as ‘a year of ill-health averted’. A DALY stands for Disability-Adjusted Life Years.
According to the World Health Organization “one DALY represents the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health. Using DALYs, the burden of diseases that cause premature death but little disability (such as drowning or measles) can be compared to that of diseases that do not cause death but do cause disability (such as cataract causing blindness)” (World Health Organization, 2025)1.
To calculate DALYs, data on disease burden per case, disease prevalence, and intervention effectiveness is needed. Disease burden per case is obtained from the Global Burden of Disease dataset by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. To determine disease prevalence, the proportion of the affected population is assessed.
Intervention effectiveness, sourced from studies and reviews, captures how much of the disease burden can be averted per treated individual with the intervention. DALYs averted per beneficiary are calculated by multiplying prevalence, effectiveness, and disease burden per case. Cost-effectiveness is then assessed by dividing the cost per beneficiary by DALYs averted, with lower costs indicating more efficient interventions.
Our impact estimates are based on rigorous secondary research, drawing from reviews of high-quality studies, global health and development data, and established evaluation methods. These figures help us understand the potential benefits of our programs in preventing illness and improving lives.
It is important to note that these are estimates, not direct or primary research data collected from our own programs. Instead, they are derived from existing studies and models that assess the effectiveness of similar interventions. While impact can vary based on geography, population, and local conditions, we use the best available evidence to provide a realistic and research-backed understanding of the difference your support is making.
Additionally, these estimates allow us to identify large differences in cost-effectiveness between charities’ programmes. However, these estimates are highly approximate and subject to considerable uncertainty, and hence by no means the only criterion that we use to determine the organizations that we recommend.
Instead, we base our recommendation on an assessment of multiple factors including organizational leadership and management, track record, monitoring and evaluation systems, transparency and focus on constant improvement.
Your support helps us apply proven solutions where they are needed most—maximizing health and well-being in the communities we serve.
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1 World Health Organization. (2025). Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr-details/158
