Tag: GiveWell’s grantmaking
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Podcast Episode 9: Advancing GiveWell’s Work on Family Planning
As GiveWell’s research team grows, that increased capacity and expertise allows us to evaluate a wider range of programs to find the most cost-effective opportunities to help people. Over the past year and a half, we’ve been investigating a new research area: family planning services that help people decide whether and when to have children.…
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Podcast Episode 7: Deepening GiveWell’s Focus on Livelihoods Programs
GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no…
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What We’ve Learned from Our First Lookbacks
At GiveWell, we’re committed to understanding the impact of our grantmaking and improving our decisions over time. That’s why we’ve begun conducting “lookbacks”—reviews of past grants, typically two to three years after making them, that assess how well they’ve met our initial expectations and what we can learn from them. We conduct lookbacks for two…
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What If We Have Extra?
What do you do if you’re in the very fortunate position of having more money than you need to meet your own immediate needs? You might find new things to buy. You might stockpile it for a rainy day. You might donate it to cost-effective global health programs. Or you might do some combination of…
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Research strategy: Water
Written by Erin Crossett and Keir Bradwell Water is a relatively new area of grantmaking for GiveWell, but we’re excited about its potential. Two billion people around the world lack access to clean drinking water, and unclean water is a major cause of illness and death, primarily through waterborne diseases such as diarrhea and cholera.…
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Increasing impact by combining programs
The idea has obvious intuitive appeal: If you’re already sending community healthcare workers door-to-door in (say) remote parts of Sierra Leone to deliver routine childhood vaccines, why not have those healthcare workers deliver chlorine for disinfecting drinking water, or oral rehydration solution for treating dehydration from diarrhea? After all, if you’re already spending money on…
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A major initiative to scale up water chlorination in India
We recommended a $38.8 million grant to Evidence Action to support the Indian government in providing clean water by setting up in-line chlorination in two states, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. This isn’t a grant designed to directly deliver a service or commodity; instead, Evidence Action will use the funding to work in close partnership…
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Malengo: Supporting students to pursue education internationally
GiveWell recently recommended a grant of up to $750,000 to Malengo, an educational migration program. Malengo supports students from low-income countries in moving to high-income countries for university. The goal is to enable them to earn a higher income over time, benefiting both the students and their families. GiveWell is co-funding the grant with Open…
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What we fund, #1: We fund many opportunities outside our top charities
This post is the fourth 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 what our research looks like and how we make decisions. How we work, #1: Cost-effectiveness is…