We’re often asked why GiveWell doesn’t recommend any organizations that focus on providing surgeries. This post will describe:
- Work we did previously to try to find surgery charities to recommend. In brief, our inability to identify organizations with room for more funding and high-quality monitoring data prevented us from recommending surgery charities in general.
- Our current (rough, preliminary) view that cataract surgery’s cost-effectiveness may be competitive with that of our priority programs, and some of the major open questions we have about our estimate.
- Organizations implementing cataract surgery programs that we’ve spoken with. They run a variety of programs, and our impression is that they do not yet have the type of high-quality monitoring information we’re interested in.
- Our plans to move forward with IDinsight to improve our understanding of cataract surgery as an intervention.