“What would make us scale or stop? NOVAH’s pre-commitment before seeing the RCT results” by I.J.J., AlexisAt

TL;DR

NOVAH (No Violence At Home) was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship (now Ambitious Impact) in 2024 to test a promising idea: preventing intimate partner violence through edutainment, in our case a serialised radio drama. Over the past two years we have produced and aired two seasons in Rwanda.

We are currently evaluating our second season through a randomized controlled trial with 2,400 couples in Rwanda in partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Preliminary results are expected in October 2026. The end-line analysis is run by IPA and our academic partners, not by NOVAH.

Edutainment to prevent intimate partner violence is promising, but it is still young as a field. We do not want to spend donor money scaling it unless the evidence shows it works at least as well as the strongest existing approaches. The RCT is what will tell us that. Therefore, before seeing those results, we want to make our decision rule public:

We will scale our programming only if the RCT finds a statistically significant relative reduction of at least 5% in physical or sexual intimate partner violence prevalence. How quickly we proceed will depend on the size and certainty of the effect.

Our current [...]

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Outline:

(00:14) TL;DR

(02:04) Background on NOVAH's cause area and intervention

(04:03) How we are evaluating our impact

(05:54) Our pre-commitment

(07:10) What happens under each result?

(07:14) Effect below 5%, or not statistically significant: pause and explore

(07:47) Effect of 5%-20%: continue as planned

(08:15) Effect above 20%: accelerate

(08:33) Why did you choose a 5% reduction?

(09:37) Is everything driven by this RCT?

(10:55) Why make this public?

(11:29) How you can hold us to this

(12:00) Should more non-profits do this?

(12:37) Final words

(13:09) Learn more and get in touch

(13:41) Appendix

(13:47) Why do you use IPV-year instead of DALYs in your cost-effectiveness?

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First published:
August 11th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Lz42uekYDBmBweq9f/what-would-make-us-scale-or-stop-novah-s-pre-commitment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.