The GiveWell Blog

Our updated top charities for giving season 2018

We’re excited to share our list of top charities for the 2018 giving season. We recommend eight top charities, all of which we also recommended last year.

Our bottom line

We recommend three top charities implementing programs whose primary benefit is reducing deaths. They are:

Five of our top charities implement programs that aim to increase recipients’ incomes and consumption. They are:

These charities represent the best opportunities we’re aware of to help people, according to our criteria. We expect GiveWell’s recommendations to direct more than $100 million to these organizations collectively over the next year. We expect our top charities to be able to effectively absorb hundreds of millions of dollars beyond that amount.

Our list of top charities is the same as it was last year, with the exception of Evidence Action’s No Lean Season. We removed No Lean Season from the list following our review of the results of a 2017 study of the program.

We also recognize a group of standout charities. We believe these charities are implementing programs that are evidence-backed and may be extremely cost-effective. However, we do not feel as confident in the impact of these organizations as we do in our top charities. We provide more information about our standout organizations here.

Where do we recommend donors give?

  • We recommend that donors choose the “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” option on our donation forms. We grant these funds quarterly to the GiveWell top charity or top charities where we believe they can do the most good.
  • If you prefer to give to a specific charity, we believe that all of our top charities are outstanding and will use additional funding effectively. If we had additional funds to allocate now, the most likely recipient would be Malaria Consortium to scale up its work providing seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
  • If you have supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you maintain your support. If you have not supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you consider designating 10 percent of your donation to help fund GiveWell’s operations.

How should donors give?

Conference call to discuss recommendations

We’re holding a conference call on Tuesday, December 4, at 12pm ET/9am PT to discuss our latest recommendations and to answer any questions you have. Sign up here to join the call.

Additional details

Below, we provide:

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Our recommendation to Good Ventures

Today, we announce our list of top charities for the 2018 giving season. We expect to direct over $100 million to the eight charities on our list as a result of our recommendation.

Good Ventures, a large foundation with which we work closely, is the largest single funder of our top charities. We make recommendations to Good Ventures each year for how much funding to provide to our top charities and how to allocate that funding among them. As this funding is significant, we think it’s important for other donors to take into account the recommendation we make to Good Ventures.

This blog post explains in detail how we decide what to recommend to Good Ventures and why; we want to be transparent about the research that leads us to our recommendations to Good Ventures. If you’re interested in a bottom-line recommendation for where to donate this year, please view our post with recommendations for non-Good Ventures donors.

Note that Good Ventures has not finalized its plans for the year and may give differently from what we’ve recommended. We think it’s unlikely that any differences would have major implications for our bottom-line recommendations for other donors.

Summary

In this post, we discuss:

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Update on No Lean Season’s top charity status

At the end of 2017, we named Evidence Action’s No Lean Season one of GiveWell’s nine top charities. Now, GiveWell and Evidence Action agree that No Lean Season should not be a GiveWell top charity this year, and Evidence Action is not seeking additional funding to support No Lean Season’s work at this time.

This post will discuss this decision in detail. In brief, we updated our assessment of No Lean Season, a program that provides loans to support seasonal migration, based on preliminary results Evidence Action began discussing with us in July from a study of the 2017 implementation of the program (hereinafter referred to as “2017 RCT”). These results suggested the program, as implemented in 2017, did not successfully induce migration. Taking this new information into account alongside previous studies of the program, we and Evidence Action do not believe No Lean Season meets our top charity criteria at this time.

Evidence Action’s post on this decision is here.

GiveWell’s mission is to identify and recommend charities that can most effectively use additional donations. While it may be disappointing for a top charity to be removed from our list of recommendations, we believe that adding and removing top charities from our list is an important part of our process. If our top charities list never changed, we would guess we were (a) acting too conservatively (i.e. not being open enough to adding new top charities), or (b) not being critical enough of groups once they’ve been added to our list (i.e. not being open enough to removing existing top charities).

We believe this decision speaks positively of Evidence Action and demonstrates our mutual commitment to updating our views based on new evidence. GiveWell has interacted with hundreds of organizations in our history, and very few have subjected their programs to a rigorous study in the way that Evidence Action did last year and, at smaller scale, in 2014. We’re excited to work with a group like Evidence Action that is committed to rigorous study and openness about results.

Summary

In this post, we will discuss:

  • The history of GiveWell and No Lean Season. (More)
  • How the 2017 RCT updated our views of No Lean Season. (More)
    • What did the 2017 RCT find? (More)
    • How did we interpret the RCT results? (More)
    • What does the future of No Lean Season look like? (More)
  • Conclusion

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