No Lean Season
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
No Lean Season was a program in Evidence Action's Beta incubator portfolio, launched in 2016 and run through Y Combinator's Winter 2017 batch. It gave $20 no-interest travel subsidies to extremely poor rural laborers in Bangladesh so they could migrate seasonally for work, aiming to raise household income and food consumption during the lean season. It was named a GiveWell top charity in 2017 before Evidence Action shut it down in June 2019.
02 / No Lean Season FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No Lean Season was killed by evidence and then by scandal. A 2017 at-scale randomized controlled trial — the gold standard the program itself championed — found the subsidies did not induce migration and had no statistically significant impact on income or consumption, so GiveWell removed it from its top-charity list. Then, in February 2019, Evidence Action learned its local implementing partner had allegedly forged the Bangladeshi government's program approval and sought bribes. With the partner terminated, rebuilding would have taken 1-2 years just to regain lost ground; combined with the disappointing evidence, the opportunity cost was too high, and the program was shut down.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
No Lean Season launches in Evidence Action's Beta portfolio, giving $20 travel subsidies to poor rural laborers in Bangladesh.
- Product launch
Named a GiveWell top charity; the 2017 at-scale RCT finds no impact on migration, income or consumption.
- Closure announced
Evidence Action shuts down No Lean Season in June 2019 after the disappointing RCT and the bribery scandal with its local partner.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Run the RCT even when it might kill your program: No Lean Season did, and shut itself down
- 02
A top-charity ranking is rented, not owned: one bad trial took it away
- 03
A forged government approval ends the partnership instantly, no matter the prior evidence
- 04
Knowing when to quit is the lesson: rebuilding for 1-2 years to reach a proven-nothing program is not worth it