In response to Elie’s recent series of posts on malnutrition, John J. comments: “What specific nutrients are they missing…etc etc etc?” Here’s a question for you: What possible use is this question to Givewell? Do you really need to get into such miniscule depth with regard to poor people who can’t afford enough food and…

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Below is the email I received from Kelli M. Donley, Program Director at Esperanca, in response to the questions I asked in Part I and Part II of this series: Dear Elie, Hi there! I am going to try to answer your questions to the best of my knowledge. I hope this helps: These questions…

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In Part I, I listed some questions about malnutrition that I think you’d have to answer to have any sense of what you’re accomplishing with your donation, and how it compares to your other options. I then went on a search – similar to what we did part-time before we started GiveWell – to see…

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In this post, I’m going to take a fresh look at malnutrition, a cause that interests me a lot. I have two goals in mind here: Think through the issue, and what I’d need to know to decide where to donate. This is particularly relevant since there’s a good chance we’ll be studying malnutrition in…

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Sean Stannard-Stockton wants to see more research focused on particular nonprofits, rather than on “techniques” for helping people; his reasoning is that this would be more useful to donors. I don’t believe it’s possible to evaluate a nonprofit as an organization, completely in isolation from what it does and whether it works. Especially if I’m…

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Sean asks (via email): What’s your view on whether funders should do research on techniques and then fund organizations that use those techniques or do research on organizations and let them decide on techniques? I was intrigued with your education research post, but was wondering if it might make more sense to find smart dynamic…

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