thank you Julia for engaging with me. most people don't give me much when I occasionally post here. you have helped me to think about different valid points and refine my own thoughts and how I word things. appreciate you !!

Sorry to write a 3rd comment in response to your latest one. Hope I'm not throwing you off, I'd be curious and enjoy hearing any additonal thoughts from you even if I disagree with them.

Just wanted to point out this fantastic Emmy-award winning documentary that profiles a few women who outreach teams managed to find and connect with a hospital that Fistula Foundation funded in Ethiopia.

One of the women profiled, the surgery didn't work (so she would be in the 12%), but they did end up finding a less ideal workaround for her anyway as they continued to care for her.

+ btw your number should be 12,000 on the 88% cure rate, not 22,000. 

+ also btw this was a good point about their methods not being perfect even if they DO reach everyone, that was a good rebuttal to what I had initially said! thank you for bringing it up and allowing me to respond further in the other comment I just posted.

+ my main point in bringing this point of "permanence" or "persistence" up... was more about what's being aimed at in a broad sense.

FF is acting toward an end (or to be fair a near-end) to untreated birth trauma. whereas other orgs eg Malaria Consortium are acting toward an indefinite dependence on foreign help and pharmaceutical companies for something that does not end (nor near-end) the problem as much as keep it more under control.

I feel like things are being looked at here in a bit of a bad faith manner. I apologize if I am wrong.

1. Yes "in it to end it" is an aspirational phrase, and limited to their "vision" page. It's not at the forefront of any details of what they are actually doing on the ground.
   
   I imagine the Fistula Foundation team is indeed motivated to see this problem eliminated from the planet totally. 
   
   Perhaps they will transform more to the prevention side as they finish their mission of tackling the extremely low-hanging fruit of curing 88% of the 1 million women who have these 2 conditions of untreated obstetric fistula and untreated perineal tears. That is the obvious thing to do for now and will eliminate 88% of the issue of untreated birth trauma.
   
   People in EA think that we will all be immortal and merge with machines. And many other crazy things. But perhaps we will never ever be able to stop all women from being permanently incontinent due to birth trauma. To me this seems more than plausible.
   
    
2. They are indeed building up local obstetric health infrastructure, in some manner or another. I did not say they are currently providing care prior to or during births as you seemed to think I said. Obstetrics is anything to do with the female reproductive organs. 
   
   I merely speculated that as FF amplifies and supports the efforts of already amazing OB/GYNs around the low-income world, and continuing to build up their outreach programs that brings in women from all over the place in to be connected with OB/GYNs, that this could at some point spill over more into the prevention side of things. Maybe I'm wrong about that. That's why I said I wasn't sure of it. But it is not far-fetched. 
   
   Greatly increasing the number of women who are connected with OB/GYN doctors... knowing where they are located and what they can do, etc, you think is not building up obstetric health infrastructure? This is the phrasing that I'm personally using but the details here are correct. Many of these 100,000 women they have funded surgeries for didn't even know their condition was curable beforehand. [edit to include this link: https://fistulafoundation.org/what-we-do/how-we-work/]

As a side note, I do also see potential for their current system to additionally cascade into more of the prevention side. I'm not sure of this. But, at least, they are definitely building up local obstetric health infrastructure around the world in long-lasting manners.

Perhaps it's my own "marketing" here that is bad, and my own wording that is sloppy in this post. 

Fistula Foundation doesn't use this phrase "a lot" and looking around their site, starting with their homepage (where they don't use this phrase), it's not at all vague what they are ending. They are ending this condition being a permanent and horrifying disability for one million women around the world. And moving it to be the easily and quickly cured condition that it is. (And already they have funded over 100,000 surgeries with an 88% cure rate, so on this front they do have some potential to actually end this condition as a disability.)

It would be permanent elimination of *untreated* obstetric fistula & perineal tears (both of which Fistula Foundation treats). Not the elimination of obstetric fistula / perineal tears themselves.

I apologize if I was a little sloppy with my wording on that.

Thank you for your thoughtful comment David !

The "permanence" idea is definitely something I have not thought too carefully on, which is why it's just one of the little side points in this piece. -- so I appreciate your thoughts to help me think about it more carefully.

I agree that persistence is another good word for this; and also that this could be a sub-topic under cost effectiveness. Great points.

I think I slightly disagree that fixing the fistula problem is different from eliminating diseases. But in any case I do agree with your overall point on that, that persistence is probably a better word to use!

Thank you again.

oh wow great find. I did not see that in searching the forum for it, as I figured the poster would include the title of the study in the text. - thank you !! happy to see someone else confirming that this is a potentially significant study, at least in UBI world.

Thank you for your insights Matthew, that all makes a lot of sense and helps me understand.

I wonder if there is an income bracket low enough in the US, where UBI focused just for that group, would have net positive impact. (This study was $29,900 average household income for the participants.) Or, if there is going to be a net negative for UBI in the US just no matter... even before getting detailed about potential counter-factual scenarios.

Funny that UBI seems to do better than more targeted approaches, in low-income countries... but in high-income countries, even for the poorest within those countries, more targeted approaches may be the better option.