The GiveWell Blog

Month: August 2018

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q2 2018

| by Natalie Crispin

In April to June 2018, we received $1.2 million in funding for making grants at our discretion. In addition, GiveWell’s Board of Directors voted to allocate $2.9 million in unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities. In this post we discuss:

  • The decision to allocate the $4.1 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) (70 percent) and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) (30 percent).
  • Our recommendation that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our discretion so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we continue to recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to AMF and 30 percent to SCI to maximize your impact.
  • Why we have allocated unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities.

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Why we don’t use subnational malaria mortality estimates in our cost-effectiveness models

| by James Snowden (GiveWell)

Summary

We recently completed a small project to determine whether using subnational baseline malaria mortality estimates would make a difference to our estimates of the cost-effectiveness of two of our top charities, the Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium. We ultimately decided not to include these adjustments because they added complexity to our models and would require frequent updating, while only making a small difference (a 3-4% improvement) to our bottom line.

Though this post is on a fairly narrow topic, we believe this example illustrates the principles we use to make decisions about what to include in our cost-effectiveness model.

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