ACTRA: A Promising Crime-Prevention Intervention at a Crucial Funding Moment

By Henning Peters, Laura Sofia, Adina Ionescu @ 2025-11-17T18:20 (+27)

ACTRA (Acción Transformadora), incubated through the AIM Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program, has just completed a strong first year — showing both traction and potential for impact. Said potential has led to the Happier Lives Institute awarding ACTRA an Honorable Mention for promising cost-effectiveness at scale.

In this post, we will briefly outline our first year’s traction, future plans, and the current opportunity to fund ACTRA. For a more thorough introduction into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-informed approaches to prevent crime, ACTRA’s Theory of Change and the evidence supporting it, you may also consult our recently updated brochure.

Executive Summary

ACTRA’s goal is to adapt and scale a cost-effective, evidence-based crime prevention program based on Cognitive Behavioral Training (CBT)  to the Latin American context. We aim to do this by partnering with governments and training local organizations to integrate CBT into their programs and deliver it sustainably.

Our early results are encouraging. Across cycles, we have demonstrated strong facilitator and participant attendance and satisfaction. After refining our curriculum, we started to also observe positive before-after changes in participants’ key psychological skills — such as emotional regulation and conflict resolution skills. By December, we will finalize our second in-house pilot Randomized Control Trial (RCT).

We plan to build on this momentum in our second year by continuing to learn and iterate on our  curriculum, strengthening government partnerships, expanding and testing across diverse outreach channels (schools, communities, prisons, …), incorporating data-based targeting (e.g. weapon-related infractions), and implementing another pilot RCT with our third generation curriculum.

To fully realize these ambitious plans and secure the next phase of our growth, we require $121,000 in additional funding.

Why It Matters

Latin America faces the world’s highest crime rates. Safety is citizens’ top concern, and crime drains an estimated 3.55% of the region’s GDP. In Colombia, the homicide rate is over four times the global average. Yet despite drastic increases in spending, most crime reduction strategies are outdated and ineffective: only an estimated 8% of public prevention programs are evidence-based.

This gap is what ACTRA addresses. We adapt and scale Cognitive Behavioral Training (CBT) — an intervention that helps people manage impulses, think ahead, make better decisions and therefore avoid a path of crime and violence. CBT can be delivered in groups by non-expert facilitators, making it highly scaleable, it is needs-based, community centered and it has been found to be the most cost-effective out of hundreds of crime prevention strategies.

The evidence is robust: over 50 randomized trials show CBT reduces criminal relapse by ~25%. Leading institutions (e.g. J-PAL, USAID, IDB) endorse CBT as highly promising, including IPA calling it a "best bet."

Our estimates suggest CBT’s benefits may be 22x more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (using GiveWell pre-2024 estimate as a benchmark). This includes benefits across health (62% of total impact), economic gains (18%), and wellbeing (20%).

Strong Progress in Just One Year

In our first year, we moved rapidly from concept to real-world implementation, built strong government ties and made sure our curriculum is highly engaging and practical.

Evidence and Learning Strategy

To ensure we can successfully scale an effective intervention, we are constantly refining our program through two complementary tracks: 

1. Implementation at Scale

Partnering with the government program “En la Buena”, we are able to train 6-10 facilitators and reach 100-200+ participants per implementation cycle. Across both cycles, we engaged an additional 400 participants receiving standard support (mostly leisure activities) who served as controls for our evaluations.

This implementation through government allows us to design from day one with scale in mind, being fully aware of the contextual factors that might influence implementation quality - such as lack of closed spaces, facilitator profiles (community leaders hired by the government) and unpredictable participant dynamics in the community setting. As some CBT programs have seen diminishing effectiveness as programs scale, we are designing with scale in mind from day one. 

2. Learning Under Ideal Conditions

In order to continue refining our program, we removed these contextual variables through two closely supervised mini-pilots (n=6 and n=5) with our NGO partner Acción Interna (Bogotá). These implementations allowed for rapid refinement and iteration of the curriculum. Both mini-pilots showed very encouraging results on before-and-after metrics. Changes were measured across five critical constructs: agency, anti-social attitudes, emotional regulation, conflict resolution and long-term thinking skills:

As reference, NEPI’s landmark RCT reported an average ITT estimate of 0.16 SD at the 2-5 week follow-up across criminogenic drivers (see table 5 in this paper). 

This strong early efficacy makes us highly optimistic about the program's potential under ideal conditions. If at least 60% of the 0.24 SD increase was attributable to our intervention, it would suggest substantial promise for cost-effective scale-up.

2026 Plans: Evidence, Partnerships, Scale

Our second year focuses on validating and preparing the program for large-scale implementation across three priorities:

Because impact may be context-dependent, we will analyze moderating factors such as participant age, facilitator type, and group setting (open vs. closed). By the end of our second year, we hope to identify  the conditions for impact at scale  — and to move into a fully powered RCT to verify this assumption in 2027.

Funding Need

The total budget for our 2026 work plan is $231,000 USD. 

We have already covered $110,000 thanks to  the Ambitious Impact’s Seed Funding Circle, the Mental Health Funding Circle, and Bloom Wellbeing Fund.

We are therefore seeking $121,000 in additional funding to make these plans a reality.

Why Support ACTRA Now?

If you’d like to learn more, you can take that deep dive here: ACTRA’s First Year Updates and Second Year Plans. We’re also happy to share our exact budget, or arrange a one-on-one conversation. If you are interested in volunteering for ACTRA or discussing a potential donation, please email henning@actra.ngo.

Thanks to everyone who has supported ACTRA in our efforts to build communities where everyone feels safe:

ACTRA’s success is a direct result of the dedication, commitment and talent each of you contributed.