Kiva, GlobalGiving, and other "giving marketplaces" | GiveWell
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You are hereHome » Research » Other Charity Reviews » Kiva, GlobalGiving, and other "giving marketplaces"
Kiva, GlobalGiving, and other "giving marketplaces"
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About this page
GiveWell aims to find the best giving opportunities we can and recommend them to donors. We tend to put a lot of investigation into the organizations we find most promising, and de-prioritize others based on limited information. When we decide not to prioritize an organization, we try to create a brief writeup of our thoughts on that charity because we want to be as transparent as possible about our reasoning.
The following write-up should be viewed in this context: it explains why we determined that (for the time being), we won't be prioritizing the organizations in question as potential top charities. This write-up should not be taken as a "negative rating" of the charities. Rather, it is our attempt to be as clear as possible about the process by which we came to our top recommendations.
A note on this page's publication date
The last time we examined the organizations discussed on this page was in July 2010. In our latest open-ended review of charities, we determined that they were unlikely to meet our criteria based on our past examination of it, so we did not revisit them.
We invite all charities that feel they meet our criteria to complete a charity submission form.
The content we created in 2010 appears below. This content is likely to be no longer fully accurate, both with respect to what it says about the organizations and with respect to what it implies about our own views and positions. With that said, we do feel that the takeaways from this examination are sufficient not to prioritize re-opening our investigation of this organization at this time.
Published: July 2010
Kiva is a platform offering donors the chance to lend to specific individuals through microfinance institutions.1 GlobalGiving offers the chance to fund specific projects run by multi-project charities.2 Other websites along these lines include MyC43 and Janta.4
To our knowledge, no international aid sites in this category provide a direct link from donor to recipient; all work through field partners, generally nonprofits.5 These organizations are usually (and specifically in the case of the four we listed) transparent about this fact, and accurately and publicly disclose how they work.6
When considering the impact of giving in this way, we are concerned about fungibility: field partners may be posting projects that they plan on funding regardless, in which case your donation is best thought of (in impact terms) as a donation to the field partner.
This issue has been written about at length in the case of Kiva, which became the subject of some controversy in 2009 when a blog pointed out (using information made publicly available by Kiva) that many of the people featured on its site were receiving the loans before website users had funded the loans.7
From what we've seen, websites in this category do not provide the sort of information we would need to assess field partners (using either our microfinance-specific criteria or our general international aid criteria).
We believe that the emotional benefits these organizations provide likely result in increased giving from those who would not be motivated to give otherwise. We also note that these organizations are, in at least some cases, exhibiting unusual transparency8, and piloting and/or working toward more rigorous evaluations.9 However, for our target audience - focused purely on impact - we prefer to find strong overall organizations rather than specific projects or individuals that they fund.
More on Kiva, specifically, at our series of blog posts on Kiva. More on the idea of fungibility at our blog posts here and here.
Sources
Global Giving. Help and FAQ. http://www.globalgiving.org/help.html#1.1.2 (accessed April 20, 2010). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5p8XIQ7Wm.
Janta. How It Works: How You can Invest in a Real Student. http://www.jantaloans.org/how (accessed July 7, 2010). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5r26XxvBQ
Kiva. How Kiva works. http://www.kiva.org/about/how (accessed April 20, 2010). Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5p8Wuy231.