User:Vipul/Development Media International

Development Media International (DMI) is a social enterprise (with both non-profit and for-profit arms) that "use[s] scientific modelling combined with mass media campaigns in order to save the greatest number of lives in the most cost-effective way."

Activities
DMI staff work on using television and radio to promote healthier behaviors in the people watching the program. At present, their goal is to focus on reducing preventable child mortality, specifically under-five mortality by promoting practices such as sleeping under treated bednets, giving children antibiotics when they have pneumonia, or giving people oral rehydration therapy. The practices were determined jointly along with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Issues of focus
DMI is currently focused on messaging that would address the leading causes of death in underdeveloped countries. Whereas the focus in developed countries is on promoting healthy behaviors such as avoidance of smoking or road traffic safety, communicable diseases are still the leading cause of death and morbidity in underdeveloped countries, and DMI's public messaging is aimed at encouraging people to take appropriate measures to prevent and check the spread of these diseases. Their main issues of focus as of now are:


 * Family planning
 * Maternal survival
 * Newborn survival
 * Child survival
 * Nutrition
 * Hygiene
 * Neglected tropical diseases

Countries of focus
DMI is currently operating its Media Million Lives in ten African countries, because child mortality, its current area of focus, is highest in Africa. DMI, working along with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, attempted to study the impact of its campaign in four African countries, and came up with the following estimates:

In April 2014, DMI published midline results from a randomized controlled trial being conducted in Burkina Faso.

Partnerships
DMI is a partner with the World Health Organization in The Partnership for Maternal, New-born, and Child Health. Its other funders and partners include the Planet Wheeler Foundation, Mulago Foundation, Wellcome Trust,  United States Agency for International Development, Department for International Development in the United Kingdom, and others.

GiveWell
In October 2012, charity evaluator GiveWell considered Development Media International as a potential organization to recommend, but decided against it for the time being, saying they hoped to return to a deeper evaluation later.

On May 2, 2014, GiveWell published a blog post by Holden Karnofsky discussing DMI's recently released randomized controlled trial results from Burkina Faso. Karnofsky wrote: "If the results – and DMI’s cost-effectiveness calculations – held up, DMI could become a GiveWell top charity with substantially better estimated “cost per (equivalent) life saved” than our current top charities. [...] However, there are many questions we would need to look into before determining whether this is in fact the case. As such, we plan to investigate DMI thoroughly this year. There is some possibility that we will decide to recommend it at the end of this calendar year, and some possibility that we will instead choose to hold off on deciding whether to recommend it until next year, when the study’s endline results (which we expect to give a more reliable picture of its impact) are released."

Giving What We Can
Effective altruism advocacy organization Giving What We Can published a blog post about DMI by Emma Howard on May 27, 2014. This was the organization's first close look at DMI. Previously, Giving What We Can had mentioned DMI's ongoing randomized controlled trial as an example of real-world national-scale randomization.

Media reception
Will Snell of DMI appeared on a panel sponsored by The Guardian (a UK newspaper) on careers in international development. Additionally, Roy Head, CEO of DMI, gave an interview to The Guardian.

Daniel Avis of SOAS Radio interviewed Roy Head, CEO of DMI, on World Radio Day to discuss DMI's work.