May 2021Noora Health, a nonprofit I've supported for years, just launcheda new NFT. It has a dramatic name, Save Thousands of Lives,because that's what the proceeds will do.Noora has been saving lives for 7 years. They run programs inhospitals in South Asia to teach new mothers how to take care oftheir babies once they get home. They're in 165 hospitals now. Andbecause they know the numbers before and after they start at a newhospital, they can measure the impact they have. It is massive.For every 1000 live births, they save 9 babies.This number comes from a studyof 133,733 families at 28 differenthospitals that Noora conducted in collaboration with the BetterBirth team at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systemsinnovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard T.H. ChanSchool of Public Health.Noora is so effective that even if you measure their costs in themost conservative way, by dividing their entire budget by the numberof lives saved, the cost of saving a life is the lowest I've seen.$1,235.For this NFT, they're going to issue a public report tracking howthis specific tranche of money is spent, and estimating the numberof lives saved as a result.NFTs are a new territory, and this way of using them is especiallynew, but I'm excited about its potential. And I'm excited to seewhat happens with this particular auction, because unlike an NFTrepresenting something that has already happened,this NFT gets better as the price gets higher.The reserve price was about $2.5 million, because that's what ittakes for the name to be accurate: that's what it costs to save2000 lives. But the higher the price of this NFT goes, the morelives will be saved. What a sentence to be able to write.
