Top-Rated Charities - 2010 Archived Version

We have published a more recent list of top charities. See our most recent list.

Thousands of hours have gone into finding our top-rated charities. They're proven, cost-effective, underfunded, and outstanding.

What do our ratings mean? Top international charities - Top United States charities - More

Top international charities

Basics					Strengths/weaknesses
Organization	Cause	Rating	Ranking	Evidence of effectiveness	Cost-effectiveness	Funding gap	Transparency	Monitoring and evaluation
Village Reach	Global health: immunizations	Gold	1	Strong	Excellent	Significant	Excellent	Excellent
Stop TB	Global health: Tuberculosis	Silver	2	Strong	Excellent	Significant	Above average	Strong
Against Malaria Foundation	Global health: malaria	Silver	3	Moderate	Excellent	Significant	Excellent	Strong
Small Enterprise Foundation	Economic empowerment: microfinance	Silver	4	Limited	Moderate	Moderate	Excellent	Strong
Village Enterprise Fund	Economic empowerment: cash transfers and business training	Silver	5	Limited	Moderate	Moderate	Excellent	Strong
Chamroeun	Economic empowerment: microfinance	Silver	6	Limited	Moderate	Moderate	Excellent	Strong

Top United States charities

Basics					Strengths/weaknesses
Organization	Cause	Rating	Ranking	Evidence of effectiveness	Cost-effectiveness	Funding gap	Transparency	Ongoing monitoring
KIPP	Education: charter schools	Gold	1	Above average	Limited	Significant	Above average	Strong
Nurse-Family Partnership	Early childhood care: nurse home visits	Gold	2	Strong	Limited	Only long term	Above average	Excellent
Invest in Kids	Youth behavior	Silver	3	Above average	Limited	Moderate	Strong	Strong

Top charities, by cause

Cause	Top charity in cause	Rating
Global health	Village Reach	Gold
Tuberculosis	Stop TB	Silver
Malaria	Against Malaria Foundation	Silver
HIV/AIDS	PSI	Notable
Microfinance	Small Enterprise Foundation	Silver
Other economic empowerment	Village Enterprise Fund	Silver
Cleft palate surgery	ReSurge International (formerly Interplast)	Notable
Developing-world education	Pratham	Notable
US education	KIPP	Gold
US early childhood care	Nurse-Family Partnership	Gold
US youth behavior	Invest in Kids	Silver

Our charity evaluation process

For specifics, see our process for international charities and our process for U.S. charities. GiveWell's process broadly consists of:

• Examine hundreds of charities and relevant academic literature
• Deeply investigate the most promising charities by our criteria
• Publish all the details of our charity recommendations and the full details of our reasoning on this website

Evaluation criteria

We look for charities that are proven, cost-effective, have "room for more funding," and are transparent. More information is available on our criteria page.

Identifying charities

We cast the net as wide as we can to consider as many charities as possible, reviewing hundreds of charities' websites and more deeply investigating the most promising ones. We identify charities from sources, including:

• Submissions to our website
• Grantees of other major funders such as the Skoll, Gates, or Mulago foundations
• Partners of research organizations such as the Poverty Action Lab or Innovations for Poverty Action

In-depth charity reviews

We perform in-depth reviews of charities that meet our heuristics for further evaluation. These are a relatively small subset of all the charities we consider and are those we believe have a reasonable chance of receiving our recommendation. We begin our process by reviewing all publicly available information about a charity including its website, external evaluations, and other relevant information. We then try and speak directly with a member of a charity's senior management, who can answer questions about the organization's overall activities and process for evaluating its impact. We also often request additional documents and information which we analyze and incorporate into our review process.