NEPI – Comprehensive Summary
Last updated: November, 2024
Problem
About 1 in 2 Liberians report being victimised by theft in the past year. But crime doesn’t just affect its direct victims; impacts entire communities, affecting mental health, economic stability, and social cohesion.
Intervention
The intervention is a combination of cognitive behavioural therapy and cash transfers delivered to high risk young men in Liberia. The therapy is an intense course (8 weeks, 4 hour sessions, three times a week) of group CBT that attempts to improve self regulation, and encourage participants to identify as a regular member of society. The cash buys participants the time to practise and implement the lessons they learned in therapy.
Organisation
NEPI (Network for Empowerment & Progressive Initiative) is an organisation scaling the use of CBT combined with a small ($300), one time, unconditional cash transfer to reduce criminal behaviour.
Evaluation
Impact
Here we analyse the cost-effectiveness of NEPI’s combined therapy and cash programme to reduce crime. I estimate the total effect of NEPI (14 WELLBYs) as stemming from two sources:
(1) First, the wellbeing benefits to the high risk young men enrolled in the programme and their families. While the evidence for these effects is higher quality, it only makes up 17% of the total benefit (3 WELLBYs per person, counted over 10 years, after a 49% discount for general concerns about replicability); based on 2 studies of 1 RCT (n = 833).
(2) Second, I estimate part of the wellbeing benefits that accrue to the wider community: the benefits that come from not being exposed to theft (11 WELLBYs). The wider wellbeing effects comprised 83% of the total benefit even after I discounted the effect by 85% to account for concerns about replicability, reverse causality, self-report bias, and generalizability. This estimate is based on 1 correlational study of the relation between theft victimisation and life-satisfaction in 20 African countries (n = 17,960). However, given that this evidence is less clearly relevant to the case of NEPI, this means that despite a solid foundation of evidence from the RCT, most of our estimated benefit of NEPI is rather speculative. Indeed, this estimate may be characterised as “very speculative” given that one of our downwards adjustments to this effect relies on some subjective guesswork (which we hope to act as a placeholder). We prefer our models to be based on strong evidence, but thought that this is a promising programme and wanted to make an (educated) guess about its impact.
Cost
NEPI estimates the current costs per person treated were around $630 per person treated. However, better cost data is currently being collected.
Cost-effectiveness
I estimate the cost-effectiveness to be 22 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated (WBp1k). However, I think this is analysis leans to the conservative side. The cost-effectiveness could be as high as 104 WBp1k if we take a few alternative analytical choices that I find reasonable but more uncertain and thus harder to defend. Notably, the cost-effectiveness figures in both cases are driven (~80%) by the more speculative estimate – that of the wellbeing benefit to the potential victims and their household.
Quality of evidence
We characterise the evidence quality as weak, and thus the analysis that’s based on it as speculative.
This is particularly due to the high degree of indirectness. The RCT evidence we use is extremely direct but the evidence we use to estimate the wellbeing effects (which represent most of the total effects) are quite indirect and low reliability. This is because they’re about the correlational evidence of burglaries (which may or may not reflect the typical wellbeing badness of crimes NEPI participants would commit).
Depth of our analysis
We also rate the depth of work gone into creating this estimate as very low. By this we mean that we believe we have only reviewed some of the relevant available evidence on the topic, and we have completed only some (10-60%) of the analyses we think are useful. Another way of expressing this is we view this report as shallow. For example we put around ~80 hours into this report. Our most in-depth reports might have absorbed 5 to 10 times as much time.
Funding need
Based on conversations with staff, we believe the funding gap will be $613,000 in 2025.
Conclusion
We think NEPI has a promising cost-effectiveness, and we’re excited about this intervention’s potential too potentially address a very hard problem to solve: crime. We think it’s plausible that NEPI’s cost-effectiveness could be higher, up to 104 WBp1k, largely based on the plausibility of higher spillover effects within the household or recipients (who commit less crime), their would-be victims, and the wider community.
We characterise the evidence quality as weak, the analysis as speculative and recognize these estimates could move around substantially with more evidence or research time. Relatedly, I think further would be extremely valuable (if difficult) to acquire more evidence of the causal effects on the wellbeing benefits of averting crime in general, and by NEPI style programmes in particular.