Our Recommendation
We highly recommend New Incentives for support because they consistently measure appropriate outcomes and impact to understand if their work is successful. This page on their website describes a recent impact study.
New Incentives meets the requirements for 4 of our 4 key criteria:
✔ Understand the Social Issue
✔ Ultimate Outcome Goals (Life Changes)
✔ Evidence of Success
✔ Counterfactual Impact
Their Vision
New Incentives’ mission is to save lives in a way that does the most good per dollar. Guided by evidence, they provide cash incentives to increase childhood vaccination rates.
The Problem
In northern Nigeria, infant mortality rates remain among the highest in the world. Despite the availability of life-saving vaccines, millions of children remain unprotected due to deeply rooted systemic barriers. Many families must travel long distances to clinics, face out-of-pocket expenses, or lack trust in the health system altogether.
Cultural, logistical, and financial challenges converge to suppress vaccine uptake in a region where preventable diseases remain a leading cause of child death. Without targeted intervention, these gaps persist across fragile health systems—particularly in areas underserved by existing immunization infrastructure.
The Solution
New Incentives tackles this problem by integrating conditional cash transfers (CCTs) into Nigeria’s public health system to encourage timely childhood vaccinations. Their program offers small financial incentives to caregivers—enough to reduce the economic burden of clinic visits without distorting behavior. These transfers are only disbursed when infants receive vaccines as per Nigeria’s routine immunization schedule.
Crucially, New Incentives does not operate parallel to public systems—it strengthens them. The organization works in lockstep with Nigeria’s federal and state health agencies, local leaders, and clinic staff to scale up access, build trust, and embed sustainable operations. Their staff visit each clinic every month to verify doses, conduct data quality checks, and ensure health workers are supported.
With operations now active in over 10 Nigerian states and more than 1,250 clinics in Kano alone, New Incentives has scaled rapidly without compromising on cost-effectiveness or data integrity. Their randomized controlled trial—conducted by IDinsight—showed a 27 percentage point increase in vaccination coverage, affirming both the model’s validity and its transformative potential.
A Sample of Their Outputs
- 5,215,389 infants enrolled in the program
- 22.1 million cash transfers disbursed
- 77.8 million childhood vaccinations encouraged
- Clinics supported in 14 Nigerian states, spanning over 9,000 health workers trained annually
- Cost per infant served decreased from $34.54 in 2019 to $17.00 by 2024, reflecting sustained efficiency gains.
- Expanded reach to underserved and insecure regions through partnership with local authorities and community leaders.
A Sample of Their Outcomes
- 108% increase in full vaccination coverage
- 62% increase in timely measles 1 vaccination
- 136% increase in caregivers knowing how many vaccines a child should receive by 1 year
A Sample of Their Impact
- Within Nigeria, 40% of under‑five deaths stem from vaccine‑preventable diseases, and modeling by New Incentives (2025) found that fully vaccinated children have about a 70% lower risk of mortality than unvaccinated peers.
- Overall, vaccination scale‑up has cut disease incidence by roughly half for several preventable illnesses in Northwest Nigeria since 2020, with clear declines in measles, diphtheria, and polio cases, and expectations of further elimination milestones as 2025 campaigns progress.
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