I work at GOAL 3, a global health organisation developing and scaling IMPALA, a digital health tool for child health in sub-Saharan Africa. My work focuses on partnerships, evidence generation, impact evaluation, and helping promising health innovations move from implementation toward stronger validation and sustainable scale.
Before joining GOAL 3, I worked at GIZ in Brussels and with several smaller NGOs. Alongside my work, I volunteer with Effective Altruism Netherlands as the Global Health and Development group organizer and support the Dutch Geefrevolutie (previously the 10% Club, relatively similar to what GWWC does but then for a Dutch audience).
More broadly, Iām interested in global health, humanitarian wellbeing, conflict-affected settings, displacement, and how we can improve the effectiveness of interventions in complex and resource-constrained environments. Iām particularly interested in questions around evidence, cost-effectiveness, scaling, and how funders should make decisions when the potential impact is high but the evidence is still developing.
Iām always interested in connecting with people working on global health, humanitarian action, migration, evidence generation, impact evaluation, and effective philanthropy.
For my work at GOAL 3, Iām particularly keen to connect with funders, researchers, evaluators, and implementation partners interested in maternal and child health, health technologies in low-resource settings, RCTs and alternative evaluation approaches, and the challenge of funding promising interventions while simultaneously building the evidence needed for scale.
Personally, Iād also love to meet others working on EA community building and those working on how EA ideas can be applied to humanitarian and conflict settings, where uncertainty, limited evidence, and practical constraints often make prioritisation particularly difficult.
Happy to connect with people interested in global health, digital health, maternal and child health, humanitarian work, migration, or, generally nerd out about anything related to international development.
I can share experiences from working across GIZ, smaller NGOs, and a growing global health organisation, including lessons around partnerships, implementation in lower-resource settings, evidence generation, impact evaluation, and engaging with governments, researchers, and funders.
Iām also happy to connect people with my network within the EA community in the Netherlands or share experiences from my involvement with EA Netherlands and Geefrevolutie.Ā
Late to the game here, but thank you for sharing Nick! I will be honest in saying that, until now, I have been quite the lurker on EA forum and reading GHD-related posts, but have had a tendency not to 'dare' put my thoughts out there in response. This is partially out of self-consciousness related reasons, and partially as I have indeed felt that the EA forum has moved away from GHD to AI/Animal Welfare, and it didn't always feel like the right place to put my thoughts on here. Big however, I agree that the decline in GHD discussion is quite sad and I just wanted to comment here to keep myself accountable to not become a part of the problem :) I'll be posting and commenting more and also just wanted to put an appreciation out there for everyone else who is active on this forum!
Great read, Jack, thanks for sharing your thoughts! And Iām willing to admit I quickly had to look up what ācurmudgeonlyā means; great word to add to my vocabulary :)
I found the point on RCTs particularly interesting. How do you think donors should approach the āevidence gapā for interventions that have promising real-world evidence, but where generating the next level of evidence (e.g. through a multi-site RCT) might itself cost several million dollars? At what point should funding that evidence generation become part of the philanthropic bet, rather than stronger evidence being a prerequisite for making the bet?
I feel like thereās a potential catch-22 here: donors may wait for gold-standard evidence before funding at scale, while organisations may not be able to generate that evidence without donors willing to take an earlier-stage risk. What does good grantmaking look like in that gap?