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Comments
Any thoughts on Ukraine related giving opportunities?
Hi, Martin,
Thank you for raising this topic. The staff at GiveWell share many of our followers’ shock and sadness at the crisis unfolding in Ukraine, as well as the desire to help. GiveWell’s focus remains, as ever, on finding the most cost-effective ways to save and improve lives on a daily, ongoing, longer-term basis; we generally don’t investigate giving opportunities related to humanitarian crises, such as those caused by war and natural disasters, so we unfortunately don’t have specific recommendations for giving to help relief efforts in Ukraine.
That said, we have written about giving during a crisis in the past. That blog post isn’t strictly relevant to the situation in Ukraine, but you may find some of the content helpful as you vet options for support (or for further clarification of our views on giving to disaster relief in general).
About five years ago, one of your senior advisors did a deep dive into the research around deworming [1] [2] and concluded the main research study relied on made him lack confidence “in the generalizability of that finding [of long term effects] to other settings.” Per [3], GiveWell concluded there is “weaker evidence on the causal relationship between reducing worm loads and improved life outcomes”. Nevertheless, GiveWell funds these programs because it still thinks “the possibility that deworming children has a subtle, lasting impact on [children’s] development” [4]. GiveWell admits this is a distant possibility, as it discounts the estimated long-term effects by 87% due to concerns about generalizability [5].
This is a big lack of confidence.
Can/will GiveWell return to evaluate these programs more thoroughly?
– You’ve expanded (hired more analysts).
– You likely have five years of additional information since the last update, either through academic research or data collected by NGOs.
P.S. Even if you can’t get more confidence that a certain long-term effect is real versus not real, at least you could get a better estimate of the “replicability adjustment” factor. This 2019 doc provides some ideas and mentions “a deworming replicability adjustment in the range of 5-30% (i.e., 70-95% discount) seems appropriate. Where one falls in that range requires a number of judgment calls.” So even if you can’t use newer data/studies put a better estimate of effect size and replicability and thus not need a replicability adjustment, at least you can shrink the uncertainty around that adjustment. Per GiveWell’s work, the adjustment factor can easily be off by a factor of 2.5 (current 13% adjustment version reasonable range of 5%-30%). That obviously has a lot of impact on how cost effective deworming programs look.
[1] https://blog.givewell.org/2016/12/06/why-i-mostly-believe-in-worms/
[2] https://blog.givewell.org/2017/01/04/how-thin-the-reed-generalizing-from-worms-at-work/
[3] https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/deworming
[4] https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/deworming#Developmentalimpacts
[5] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B1fODKVbnGP4fejsZCVNvBm5zvI1jC7DhkaJpFk6zfo/edit#gid=472531943&range=A11
[6] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-F5sZBq6FD6E73SWkKFhwMR9gCdKUCTfp9dOe0I-1vw/edit