Today’s guest is Noam Angrist, the founder of Young 1ove, an NGO providing sex education to 35,000+ young people in Botswana. Sex-ed is a complicated issue, and over the decades it’s been hard to tell what worked and what didn’t. In Botswana, where 22% of the population has HIV, much of it hadn’t worked. But when Noam used a tool from the scientific community, he could actually tell what interventions worked. Like a scientist, Noam discarded the interventions that didn’t work and focused on the ones that did. Soon, teenage pregnancy dropped by 28% in the communities he worked with, and he had the evidence to prove it. The tool that Noam used was the randomized control trial (RCT). In this episode, Noam talks about his experience carrying out RCTs and discusses their limitations, challenges, and financial costs. He faced countless personal struggles along the way, like using his personal savings to fund the startup years, not having funding as launch day neared, government officials obstructing the program, and having to make 11-hour drives through the dirt roads of Africa. When things got tough, Noam reminded himself to, “stay fiercely optimistic,” and “push through even when things are collapsing around you.” Noam’s goal is to provide sex-ed to a million youth in southern Africa in the coming years. For his work, Noam Angrist has been named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 List for Social Entrepreneurship. Noam Angrist's Reading List Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Do Teenagers Respond to HIV Risk Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya By Pascaline Dupas Noam Angrist Show Notes Noam Angrist studied math and economics at MIT He took a class at MIT with Esther Duflo, one of the founders of The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). The Poverty Action Lab popularized the Randomized Control Trials. Randomized control trials have revealed that most interventions don’t work Noam Angrist was influenced by an article he read in Esther Duflo’s class: Do Teenagers Respond to HIV Risk Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Kenya By Pascaline Dupas Noam worked for the World Bank and J-PAL upon graduation and realized that many research studies produce papers but not programs Noam did a project at the World Bank about Botswana. He went to the University of Botswana to better understand the situation. The university students give free tuition and provides student stipends. But when stipends run out at the end of the month, they become sugar babies. According to the study by Dupas, the unprotected sex with sugar daddies was infecting many young people with HIV, but the research paper was not being turned into a program Noam went out into the field with a team and turned the research into an actual program Doers need plans that are simple, clear, and actionable but research papers are usually complicated and long. The topics of sex and sugar babies are taboo Noam and his team organized sex-ed workshops with the college students and found out that what the facilitators did or said affected the results greatly Small, five-minute ice breakers at the beginning of the session changes the whole dynamic of the workshop and people talk more. Or when someone contributes a comment, everyone snaps and creates an environment of positivity and enthusiasm The workshops are more effective when the facilitator is also a youth. It is truly a youth-to-youth model Young 1ove now focus on girls ages 12-16 Women in areas with high HIV rates tend to have multiple, concurrent sexual partners Due to the nature of the HIV virus, the disease is easier spread when less time has passed between sexual intercourse with different partners. That is why having concurrent partners is so dangerous. 45% of 40-year-ol