Author Archives: Jeremy Rehwaldt

November 2023 updates

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
Research updates
We’ve recently published a number of new research pages—below are a few highlights. If you’d like to sign up for email updates whenever we publish new research materials, you can do so here.

Perennial malaria chemoprevention in Ghana

In February 2023, GiveWell recommended a $1.6 million grant to PATH to coordinate a randomized controlled trial measuring the effectiveness of malaria interventions for infants and young children living in areas with perennial transmissions of malaria. The trial, which will take place in Ghana, will compare the effects of administering the RTS,S malaria vaccine and perennial malaria chemoprevention (PMC) together versus the effects of administering only the vaccine. These types of trials can provide evidence to governments about the most effective malaria programs for their settings.

Water chlorination in Kenya, India, and Nigeria

In January 2023, GiveWell recommended a $1.8 million grant to the Development Innovation Lab (DIL) at the University of Chicago to conduct research on water chlorination programs in Kenya and develop plans for additional research on chlorination in India and Nigeria. We think water chlorination is a cost-effective way to avert deaths and have recently made several grants to support chlorination programs. The results of this grant will improve our understanding of such programs and could potentially lead to more funding for them in the future.

Organizational support for IRD Global

In April 2023, GiveWell recommended a $5.4 million grant to IRD Global for organizational support. We believe IRD Global has the potential to be an unusually promising grantee because of its emphasis on high-quality evidence, transparency, and proven operational capacity in areas with high disease burdens. We expect this grant will strengthen the organization and increase its likelihood of implementing cost-effective programs in the future.

Updates from top charities
New Incentives
New Incentives recently announced that it has enrolled over 1 million infants in its immunization program so far in 2023, more than in all previous years combined! In this video, Magaji Soja,

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How we work, #2: We look at specific opportunities, not just general interventions

This post is the second in a multi-part series, covering how GiveWell works and what we fund. The first post, on cost-effectiveness, is here. Through these posts, we hope to give a better understanding of our research and decision-making.
Looking forward, not just backward
When we consider recommending funding, we don’t just want to know whether a program has generally been cost-effective in the past—we want to know how additional funding would be used.
People sometimes think of GiveWell as recommending entire programs or organizations. This was more accurate in GiveWell’s early days, but now we tend to narrow in on specific opportunities. Rather than asking whether it is cost-effective to deliver long-lasting insecticide-treated nets in general, we ask more specific questions, such as whether it is cost-effective to fund net distributions in 2023 in the Nigerian states of Benue, Plateau, and Zamfara, given the local burden of malaria and the costs of delivering nets in those states.
Geographic factors affecting cost-effectiveness
The same program can vary widely in cost-effectiveness across locations. The burden of a disease in a particular place is often a key factor in determining overall cost-effectiveness. All else equal, it’s much more impactful to deliver vitamin A supplements in areas with high rates of vitamin A deficiency than in areas where almost everyone consumes sufficient vitamin A as part of their diet. Similarly, one of our top charities, New Incentives, has chosen to operate in northern Nigeria largely because relatively low baseline vaccination rates mean its work is especially impactful there.[1]
As another example, we estimate it costs roughly the same amount for the Against Malaria Foundation to deliver an insecticide-treated net in Chad as it does in Guinea (about $4 in both locations). But, we estimate that malaria-attributable deaths of young children in the absence of nets would be roughly 5 times higher in Guinea than in Chad (roughly 8.8 deaths per 1,000 per year versus roughly 1.7 per 1,000), which leads AMF’s program to be much more cost-effective in Guinea. Overall, we estimate that AMF’s program is around 27x cash in Guinea and around 5x cash in Chad.[2]
This map from Our World in Data gives a sense of how deaths from malaria vary worldwide.[3]

Because cost-effectiveness varies with geography, we ask questions specific to the countries or regions where a program

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How we work, #1: Cost-effectiveness is generally the most important factor in our recommendations

This post is the first in a multi-part series, covering how GiveWell works and what we fund. We’ll add links to the later posts here as they’re published. Through these posts, we hope to give a better understanding of our research and decision-making.
Why cost-effectiveness matters
The core question we try to answer in our research is: How much good can you do by giving money to a certain program?
Consider how much good your donation could do if you give to a program that costs $50,000 to save a life versus one that costs $5,000 to save a life (which is roughly what we estimate for our top charities). Giving to the latter would have 10 times more impact. While in an ideal world both programs would receive funding, we focus on identifying the most cost-effective programs so that the limited amount of funding available can make the greatest difference.
The basics
We’ve written in detail here about our approach to cost-effectiveness analysis and its limitations. Our bottom-line estimates are always uncertain, and we don’t expect them to be literally true. At the same time, they help us compare programs to each other so that we can direct funding where we believe it will have the greatest impact.
At a very high level, assessing cost-effectiveness generally involves looking at:

The cost per person reached. For example, how much does it cost to treat one child with vitamin A supplementation for one year?
The outcomes of the program. Determining these outcomes often involves examining two factors:

The overall burden of a problem. For instance, how many kids who will be reached with vitamin A supplementation would otherwise have died?[1]
The effect the program has. For example, how much does vitamin A supplementation reduce mortality rates relative to that baseline, and are there other benefits to providing vitamin A?

We use unconditional cash transfers as a benchmark for comparing opportunities, such that a program is estimated to be “12x cash” if we believe it’s 12 times more impactful per dollar than giving money directly to people living in poverty. In other words, if we estimate that a program is 12x cash, we think donating $100 to that program does as much good as donating $1,200 to a program that delivers unconditional cash transfers.
More detail
We aim to come to an all-things-considered view that

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Rationalising externally-driven change: charities and the exploitation of new-practice requirements

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Although legitimacy is critical when attempting to introduce new practices in the nonprofit charity sector, little is known about individual processes of legitimation within such organizations, and how legitimacy emerges and interacts with perceived external pressures. This article investigates how charity organizational actors (using rhetorical arguments) linguistically legitimate/delegitimate new practices as a means of facilitating internal and external legitimacy. The study explores, as an example of organizational change in its early stages, newly-introduced accountability and reporting practices emanating from the current Charity Statement of Recommended Practice in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. The findings show that external regulative and cognitive pressures can be assessed and legitimated as something rational and reasonable in cases where organizational actors perceive the change as “exploitable.” Moreover, they provide evidence of how different interpretations can foster implementation and action (or trigger inaction) and affect the introduction of business-like practices in the nonprofit sector.

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An Empirical Mapping of Environmental Protection and Conservation Nonprofit Discourse on Social Media

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article is a comprehensive empirical overview of environmental protection and conservation nonprofits’ discourse on social media. To what extent have these nonprofits framed climate change in their public discourse and how has it evolved over time? How do organizational characteristics and resources affect their social media behavior? To address our research questions, we use machine learning with texts—specifically topic modeling—to track the activity of 120 environmental nonprofits during a 14-year time span on X, formerly known as Twitter. Our analysis of more than 1.3 million tweets shows that climate change, although not closely aligned with the missions for more than half of the top tweeting organizations included in our sample, has consistently been a prevalent priority issue on their social media agendas for more than a decade. This heightened attention to climate change discourse by the environmental nonprofit sector denotes their uniform efforts to inspire government for climate action.

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How Advocacy Nonprofits Interact With and Impact Business: Introducing a Strategic Confrontation and Collaboration Interaction Model (SCCIM)

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This paper proposes a distinctive strategic model (Strategic Confrontational and Collaborative Interaction Model [SCCIM]) for nonprofit organizations acting within the business ecosystem. The SCCIM maps both confrontational and collaborative strategies and tactics, thus accommodating the extensive range of nonprofit interaction alternatives toward business. Whereas confrontational and collaborative methods are well researched in the nonprofit-political realm, a comprehensive overview of these nonprofit strategies in the economic sphere is currently lacking. This research builds on both the business management and social movement literature, extending existing approaches via case analysis with a nonprofit-centric perspective, leveraging stakeholder theory. The resulting encompassing model provides a theoretical framework that may generate alternative insights for further academic research in nonprofit–business interaction. In addition, the SCCIM may be leveraged as a tool for practitioners: first, to enhance nonprofits’ strategies and tactics toward business, and second, to optimize the impact of the chosen interactions.

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October 2023 updates

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
We’re always excited when we can use the media to tell people about GiveWell’s work—we encourage you to check out our recent feature on the EconTalk podcast! In this episode, GiveWell’s CEO Elie Hassenfeld spoke with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts to discuss GiveWell’s history and how we strive to find the most charitable “bang for your buck.” The conversation covered how and why GiveWell was founded, our methods for determining top charities and other high-impact grant opportunities, and the dangers of relying too heavily on data.
Research updates
We’ve recently published a number of new research pages—below are a few highlights. If you’d like to sign up for email updates whenever we publish new research materials, you can do so here.

Perennial malaria chemoprevention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

In November 2022, GiveWell made a $6.2 million grant to PATH to conduct a two-year implementation pilot of perennial malaria chemoprevention (PMC)1Note: Intermittent preventive treatment in infants is now called perennial malaria chemoprevention. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14396_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14396_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where malaria is a leading cause of death among young children. PMC is the provision of preventive antimalarial medicine to children under the age of two at routine vaccination visits. We believe this grant to be highly cost-effective and expect PATH will reach over 180,000 infants during the pilot. We believe that this pilot, by demonstrating the possibility for successful implementation in DRC, has the potential to accelerate PMC support from other donors, which could lead to roughly 900,000 infants receiving PMC over the next decade.

Deworming programs in Burundi and Mauritania

In June 2023, GiveWell made a $1.5 million exit grant to Unlimit Health, formerly the SCI Foundation, for its deworming programs in Burundi and Mauritania. This grant extended funding for these programs for two years (through

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