No Lean Season (YC W17) raises $11.5m “philanthropic round”

No Lean Season (YC W17) has raised $11.5m in philanthropic funding from Good Ventures, a foundation founded by Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. This makes it, by income, one of the largest non-profits to go through YC so far.

No Lean Season gives poor rural workers $19 for a bus ticket to the city to find work, during the period between harvesting and planting when jobs are scarce. https://www.evidenceaction.org/beta-no-lean-season/#the-solution-no-lean-season

Yale economists conducted a randomised-controlled trial of the program, finding it leads to significant gains in income and food consumption compared to a control. http://faculty.som.yale.edu/mushfiqmobarak/papers/migration.pdf

This funding will enable them to scale up to 450,000 households in Bangladesh over the next three years. The program could eventually be scaled to tens of millions of households.

YC helped No Lean Season to use software to dramatically cost the costs of the program, increasing their cost-effectiveness. https://blog.ycombinator.com/no-lean-season-yc-w17-named-givewell-top-charity/

No Lean Season has also been named a "top charity" by GiveWell, along with only 9 other organisations, which are among the most evidence-backed and cost-effective charities in the world that help the global poor. https://blog.givewell.org/2017/11/27/our-top-charities-for-giving-season-2017/