The GiveWell Blog

All Uncategorized Posts

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q3 2019

(updated on: ) | by Grace Hultquist

In the third quarter of 2019, donors gave a combined $2.6 million to GiveWell for granting to recommended charities at our discretion. We greatly appreciate this support, which enables us to direct funding where we believe it can be used most impactfully. We grant this funding to one or more of our top charities each quarter.

We decided to allocate all $2.6 million to Helen Keller International’s (HKI) vitamin A supplementation (VAS) program. HKI is a GiveWell top charity that supports provision of vitamin A supplements to young children, reducing their likelihood of dying from infectious disease. It does so by providing technical assistance, engaging in advocacy, and contributing funding to government-run VAS programs in sub-Saharan Africa. We based our decision on our estimate of the high cost-effectiveness of the work HKI expects to conduct with this funding.

We provide an updated recommendation for donors below.

Summary

In this post, we discuss:

  • what HKI will do with this funding. (More)
  • our process for deciding where to allocate funds. (More)
  • our bottom line for donors giving today. (More)

Read More

Update on GiveWell’s intervention research in 2017

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

One of our major goals for 2017 is “intervention prioritization,” our work to assess a large number of programs (interventions) as potential GiveWell priority programs we’d be interested in recommending charities working on.

Summary

This post will provide a brief overview of our intervention work this year, focusing on the interim and full intervention reports we’ve published in 2017.

Programs we plan to continue investigating:

Programs we decided not to prioritize additional research on:

Read More

Deciding whether to recommend fistula management charities

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

We’ve long been interested in fistula surgery as a potential GiveWell priority program. However, as with other surgery charities, we have struggled to identify an organization that meets GiveWell’s criteria. Now, we’re working with a group called IDinsight and are excited that we may be able to consider a fistula surgery organization as a potential GiveWell top charity.

Our longstanding interest in interventions to treat fistula can be attributed in part to the popular narrative presented about fistula–the condition, which is often associated with social ostracization–appears to cause a significant amount of suffering, and seems to be treatable. We’re not sure how representative the popular narrative is, but as donors, it has contributed to our continued interest in better understanding this intervention, along with the feeling that surgery charities in general may offer low-cost, life-changing impacts.

Summary

This post will discuss:

  • Fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention.
  • Our open questions and uncertainty around fistula management programs, particularly their costs.
  • Our plans to partner with IDinsight to help answer some of our questions about fistula management.

Read More

Are GiveWell’s top charities the best option for every donor?

(updated on: ) | by Catherine Hollander

We’re sometimes asked whether we think GiveWell’s top charities are the “best,” in some absolute sense of the word, or whether we’d ever advise that a donor give to an opportunity outside of our recommendations. This post aims to clarify how GiveWell thinks about different giving options and their suitability for different types of donors.

We believe that GiveWell’s top charities offer donors an outstanding opportunity to do a lot of good and are the best option for most donors. However, some donors—those with a very high degree of trust in a particular individual or organization to make this decision, donors with lots of time (in excess of 50 hours per year, and likely more) to consider their giving decision, or donors whose values point strongly toward a particular cause outside of the ones GiveWell covers—may find opportunities to have a greater impact per dollar than GiveWell’s top charities. Note that we think these characteristics are likely to be necessary, but not sufficient, for finding these types of opportunities; we still expect good giving to be hard, and spending, for example, 50 hours per year on research isn’t necessarily going to yield better opportunities.

In this post, we describe relevant considerations for donors in greater detail.

Read More

Next Page »