causal
No Lean Season: scaling failure and premature exit
GiveWell's funding of No Lean Season—a program incentivizing seasonal migration in Bangladesh based on Mobarak's small RCT—failed at scale because the small, hands-on model became harder to deliver through large microfinance institutions, and GiveWell made two mistakes: underestimating the difficulty of scaling and exiting too quickly rather than committing to a longer, iterative timeframe.
causalpending
Speaker
Elie HassenfeldEvidence Quote
“the better prediction to have made back then would have been: If this is going to work, it's going to be hard. It's going to take some time and some iteration to get the model right at scale.”
Created: 6/13/2026, 12:29:30 AM
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