Understanding the causal impact of philanthropic campaigns on public health is crucial for making informed funding decisions. One area where this is particularly relevant is tobacco control, where Bloomberg Philanthropies has invested heavily in advocacy efforts. However, there's limited rigorous evidence on whether these investments have directly reduced tobacco use in their target countries.

Evaluating the Impact of Anti-Tobacco Advocacy

One approach to measuring this impact would be through synthetic control analysis. This method compares Bloomberg's focus countries against similar countries without Bloomberg-funded programs by creating a "synthetic" version of each treatment country. The analysis would examine trends in tobacco use before and after Bloomberg's interventions, while controlling for other factors like tax policies or advertising bans that might affect consumption. Such an evaluation could start with a few countries where Bloomberg's involvement is well-documented and high-quality tobacco use data is available.

Who Would Benefit

The findings could be valuable for:

• Philanthropic organizations deciding where to allocate health policy funding
• Public health researchers studying advocacy-based interventions
• Local governments looking to refine their tobacco control strategies

Overcoming Implementation Challenges

Key challenges would include separating Bloomberg's impact from other anti-tobacco measures and dealing with limited data in some countries. These could be addressed by:

• Using subnational data where Bloomberg's work was particularly focused
• Applying statistical methods to fill data gaps where appropriate
• Conducting interviews with local policymakers to map advocacy efforts to specific outcomes

While philanthropic evaluations often face questions about objectivity, this approach would emphasize transparency through open-source tools and pre-registered analysis plans.