“Kaya Guides Pilot Results” by RachelAbbott

EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)

Summary.
Who We Are: Kaya Guides runs a self-help course on WhatsApp to reduce depression at scale in low and middle-income countries. We help young adults with moderate to severe depression. Kaya currently operates in India. We are the world's first nonprofit implementer of Step-by-Step, the World Health Organization's digital guided self-help program, which was proven effective in two RCTs.

Pilot: We ran a pilot with 103 participants in India to assess the feasibility of implementing our program on WhatsApp with our target demographic and to generate early indicators of its effectiveness.

Results: 72% of program completers experienced depression reduction of 50% or greater. 36% were depression-free. 92% moved down at least a classification in severity (i.e. they shifted from severe to moderately severe, moderately severe to moderate, etc). The average reduction in score was 10 points on the 27-point PHQ-9 depression questionnaire.

Context: To offer a few [...]

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Outline:

(04:44) Part 1. About the Kaya Guides Program

(04:49) What is Kaya Guides and what do we do?

(05:13) How the program works

(05:35) Evidence base

(06:11) Why guided self-help is effective

(06:50) Why this work matters

(07:52) Program design

(08:46) Target participant profile

(09:14) Impact measurement

(10:00) Part 2. Pilot Impact and Cost-Effectiveness

(10:18) Impacts on depression

(11:01) Comparison

(12:10) Effect Size Estimate

(14:35) Takeaway

(15:02) Cost-Effectiveness

(15:29) Pilot Cost-Effectiveness

(17:15) 2025 Projected Cost-Effectiveness

(19:15) Program Impacts According to Participants

(22:50) Part 3. Recruitment

(22:55) Quick Stats

(24:20) Participant Profile

(25:38) Part 4. Retention

(27:45) Part 5. Participant Feedback

(31:19) What's Next

(32:05) Support Us

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First published:
June 16th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6NaRJpSn2zfRSnGYN/kaya-guides-pilot-results

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.