Last Updated: December 2020
In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes evaluations of our own work. This page summarizes the funding we influenced in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available and analyzed.
Money moved
In 2019, GiveWell influenced charitable giving in several ways. The following table summarizes the money that we were able to track.
For more details on our money moved, our growth, and our donors, see:
Money moved to recommended charities
The chart below shows GiveWell's annual money moved to our recommended charities (top charities and standout charities) and via our Incubation Grants program. In this chart, we include only donations that we can confidently attribute to our research (more detailed definition below).
Please note that the Open Philanthropy support marked in gray on the chart below refers only to grants that Open Philanthropy, the single largest funder of our recommended charities, made to GiveWell's top and standout charities. It does not include support that Open Philanthropy provided as a funder of GiveWell Incubation Grants, which are listed separately in purple.
The table below shows GiveWell's money moved to our recommended and standout charities.1
| Charity | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2007-2012 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Malaria Consortium – Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention | $52,946,634 | $37,339,086 | $29,125,071 | $5,054,101 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Against Malaria Foundation | $29,958,925 | $28,581,931 | $20,663,328 | $33,742,956 | $38,786,450 | $9,866,835 | $2,551,449 | $9,035,392 |
| GiveDirectly | $17,358,258 | $14,012,950 | $10,103,626 | $18,390,049 | $57,185,355 | $12,171,167 | $11,033,254 | $1,558,497 |
| Helen Keller International's Vitamin A Supplementation Program | $15,222,729 | $10,943,891 | $7,776,601 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Development Media International | $9,028,197 | $1,298,110 | $409,303 | $663,107 | $500,035 | $612,540 | $0 | $0 |
| Sightsavers' Deworming Program | $2,996,005 | $9,999,763 | $2,660,257 | $3,109,090 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| The END Fund's Deworming Program | $2,941,175 | $2,772,566 | $2,842,723 | $5,422,097 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| SCI Foundation | $2,856,298 | $5,947,206 | $12,098,906 | $16,123,430 | $3,685,071 | $6,399,690 | $2,202,407 | $1,972,620 |
| Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative | $2,661,630 | $12,392,229 | $26,044,483 | $7,112,402 | $11,910,125 | $1,167,635 | $2,145,379 | $0 |
| Iodine Global Network | $520,846 | $497,063 | $571,431 | $597,766 | $857,885 | $478,530 | $0 | $0 |
| Evidence Action unrestricted | $342,904 | $372,756 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Evidence Action's Dispensers for Safe Water | $250,561 | $154,810 | $135,453 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Project Healthy Children | $244,238 | $162,268 | $140,502 | $377,360 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Living Goods | $206,260 | $186,506 | $126,615 | $331,518 | $338,936 | $514,893 | $0 | $0 |
| GAIN – Universal Salt Iodization | $159,829 | $177,681 | $225,806 | $559,603 | $494,309 | $484,792 | $0 | $0 |
| Food Fortification Initiative | $135,265 | $168,461 | $150,242 | $362,678 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Zusha! Road Safety Campaign | $112,478 | $109,328 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Malaria Consortium unrestricted | $0 | $150,338 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Other/previously recommended charities | $109,577 | $167,785 | $7,728,428 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $54,343 | $3,818,554 |
| Total to recommended charities | $138,051,811 | $125,434,728 | $120,802,775 | $91,846,157 | $113,758,166 | $31,696,081 | $17,986,832 | $16,385,063 |
Notes:
- Because a significant amount of GiveWell's money moved comes in around December each year, we only update these figures annually.
- Because donations tend to be clustered in late December and early January, grouping these donations together provides a more accurate picture of annual growth. In the table and chart above, we report on "metrics years," each of which covers the period from February 1 to January 31 (e.g., "2012" refers to February 1, 2012 to January 31, 2013).
Money moved by program
Our top and standout charities implement a variety of health and poverty alleviation programs. But some of our recommended charities work on the same type of program. For example, we recommend four charities for their programs that support treatments for parasitic worm infections (deworming programs), two charities for their programs to prevent malaria (Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program and the Against Malaria Foundation), and four charities for their food fortification programs.
The table below shows GiveWell's 2019 money moved by program area. The majority of our money moved was directed to malaria prevention programs—followed by cash transfers, vitamin A supplementation, deworming, and mass media campaigns. Other programs each received less than 1% of our total money moved.
Incubation Grants
In 2019, Open Philanthropy,2 EA Funds, and a private donor made GiveWell Incubation Grants due to our recommendation, totaling $14 million. These grants support organizations at any point in their development, with the hope of identifying additional top charities to recommend to our donors in the future and improving our existing charity recommendations. The following table shows Incubation Grants made in our 2019 metrics year.3
| Grant | Organization Name | Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| IDinsight—Endline Evaluation of New Incentives RCT | IDinsight | $2,105,962 | August 2019 |
| Fortify Health—General Support (2019) | Fortify Health | $1,005,716 | August 2019 |
| Charity Science Health—Exit Grant | Charity Science Health | $214,425 | July 2019 |
| Instiglio—Designing a Health Outcomes Fund | Instiglio | $60,000 | April 2019 |
| IDinsight—Beneficiary Preferences Survey (2019) | IDinsight | $474,374 | March 2019 |
| Evidence Action—Strengthen Operations (2019) | Evidence Action | $7,751,915 | March 2019 |
| Evidence Action—Impact Evaluation of Iron and Folic Acid Supplementation ("Phase 2") | Evidence Action | $800,000 | March 2019 |
| IDinsight—New Incentives RCT (February to May 2019) | IDinsight | $184,324 | February 2019 |
| UC Berkeley—Research Support | Regents of the University of California, Berkeley | $170,000 | February 2019 |
| Innovation in Government Initiative—General Support | Innovation in Government Initiative | $1,000,000 | December 2018 |
Other money moved
In addition to donations that we can confidently attribute to our research (detailed definition of these types of donations below), our best guess is that we had additional impact in 2019 via (a) untracked donations made based on our recommendation and (b) decisions where our research played an important role but research by other groups also played a role (and thus GiveWell should not receive full 'credit' for influencing the donation).
- Untracked donations: We estimate that donors gave $15-25 million based on our research that they did not directly attribute to GiveWell. We calculated this total by assuming that the proportion of charities' untracked donations (where we do not know the reason the donation was made) that are due to GiveWell is equivalent to the proportion of their total donations (excluding those from Open Philanthropy) that are due to GiveWell, the latter of which we know based on donor reporting and donations through GiveWell's website. In other words, if GiveWell accounts for 50% of a charity's total revenue, and the charity receives $100,000 in donations that we have not attributed to any source, we estimate that 50%—$50,000—of those are due to GiveWell's recommendation.
- Decisions where our research played an important role: We believe our research has played a significant role in the decisions of The Life You Can Save, an organization that makes charity recommendations. We also understand that our research was not the only input into its decisions about what to recommend, and we therefore include it in the table above in a separate category from our headline money moved. Also included in this category are donations from two other donors that we believe were partially due to GiveWell.
Details about other money moved are available in our 2019 annual metrics report.
Web traffic
We did not prioritize sharing web traffic data as part of our 2019 metrics report because we are investing more effort in outreach and expect to be able to report more effectively on website-related metrics in the future.
What we count as "money moved"
- Donations made to GiveWell to support our recommended charities.
- Donations made directly to our recommended charities that donors reported as attributable to GiveWell.
- Donations made directly to our recommended charities that donors reported as attributable to other organizations that we believe relied heavily on our research (e.g., Effective Altruism Foundation, RC Forward, Effective Altruism Australia).
- Donations that donors report to us (informally or using our donation report form) as donations that they made on the strength of our recommendation.
- Grants made as part of our Incubation Grants program.
We are cautious not to double-count donations reported by the charity and the donor. For more details on our methodology, see the appendix of our 2019 annual metrics report.
Previous metrics reports
- 1.
The amounts listed in this table represent our most recent estimates of our money moved by charity from 2007 to 2019. These figures may not correspond precisely with those presented in past metrics reports. We sometimes receive new information after publishing our annual metrics reports that causes us to update our money moved estimates for prior years.
- 2.
Some earlier GiveWell Incubation Grants were listed as coming from Good Ventures, rather than Open Philanthropy. You can read more about the relationship between Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy here.
- 3.
A $1 million grant to J-PAL's Innovation in Government Initiative, dated on our website as December 2018, was not made until March 2019 and is included in the $14 million total. Included in the $14 million total but not listed in the table below are two grants, totaling $193,796, which were made in 2019 but are not yet listed on our website.
