science

New Incentives

New Incentives is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand New Incentives rather than just read about it. In short: New Incentives is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that operates in Nigeria, running a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. They aim to increase infantile vaccination through cash transfers, raising public awareness and reducing the frequency of vaccine stockout.

Key takeaways

New Incentives belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect New Incentives to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of New Incentives from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

New Incentives is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that operates in Nigeria, running a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. They aim to increase infantile vaccination through cash transfers, raising public awareness and reducing the frequency of vaccine stockout. In Nigeria, New Incentives is known as the All Babies Are Equal (ABAE) Initiative, due to the name New Incentives not being accepted for registration. The organization is sometimes referred to as NI-ABAE. As of 2024, New Incentives is one of Givewell's top four charities.

History New Incentives was founded in 2011 by Patrick Stadler, Pratyush Agarwal, and Svetha Janumpalli. HIV prevention was originally at the heart of their strategy. Women could receive cash transfers upon registration of their pregnancy, HIV testing and birth delivery at hospital. Other at risk-pregnancies were later included, such as anemia, hepatitis and tuberculosis. New Incentives now focuses on immunisation of under-five children.

Operations The New Incentives CCT program is run in North West, parts of North East and North Central Nigeria in the states of Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Niger, Sokoto, Yobe and Zamfara. This region has one of the lowest vaccination coverages in the world, less than 25% of the infants are vaccinated. In 2022, Nigeria had an estimated under-five mortality rate of 107 per 1000 live births, one of the highest in the world. Of these children about 40% died from vaccine-preventable diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea and measles. The under five child mortality rate differs from state to state, with Kebbi having the highest (252 deaths per 1000), Ogun having the lowest (30 deaths per 1000), and the North West region having the highest regional rate at 187 deaths per 1000 according to the Nigeria Demographic and Health survey from 2018. The cash transfers from New Incentives are conditioned on the vaccination of infants with the BCG vaccine, the pentavalent vaccine, the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and the meningococcal vaccine, which immunize them against tuberculosis, measles, pneumococcal infection and hepatitis B, among others. Other activities include improving the supply chain of vaccines and vaccine information campaigns.

Effectiveness In 2024, the charity evaluator GiveWell ranked New Incentives among its top four charities. It estimated that it costs approximately between $1000 and $5000 to prevent a death this way. This evaluation was partly based on the randomized controlled trial conducted by IDinsight. The increase in the proportion of vaccinated children was estimated to be between 11 and 22 percent in areas where New Incentives works.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with New Incentives

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what New Incentives claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to New Incentives before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about New Incentives ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of New Incentives

In research: New Incentives appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses New Incentives in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: New Incentives is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 501(c)(3) organizations, Charities based in California, Foreign charities operating in Nigeria, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for New Incentives outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study New Incentives in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what New Incentives means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain New Incentives out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is New Incentives in simple terms?

Why does New Incentives matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study New Incentives?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on New Incentives.