Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post June 2023 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Tag Archives: philantrhopy
Why GiveWell funded the rollout of the malaria vaccine
Since our founding in 2007, GiveWell has directed over $600 million to programs that aim to prevent malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that causes severe illness and death. Malaria is preventable and curable, yet it killed over 600,000 people in 2021—mostly young children in Africa.[1]
Following the World Health Organization’s approval of the RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine (RTS,S) in late 2021,[2] GiveWell directed $5 million to PATH to accelerate the rollout of the vaccine in certain areas of Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi. This grant aimed to enable these communities to gain access to the vaccine about a year earlier than they otherwise would, protecting hundreds of thousands of children from malaria.[3]
Although we’re very excited about the potential of the RTS,S malaria vaccine to save lives, it isn’t a panacea. We still plan to support a range of malaria control interventions, including vaccines, nets, and antimalarial medicine.
In this post, we will:
Explain how we found the opportunity to fund the malaria vaccine
Discuss why we funded this grant
Share our plan for malaria funding moving forward
Identifying a gap in vaccine access
In October 2021, we shared our initial thoughts on the approval of the RTS,S malaria vaccine by the World Health Organization (WHO). At that point, we weren’t sure whether the vaccine would be cost-effective and were not aware of any opportunities for private donors to support the expansion of vaccine access.
In the following months, our conversations with PATH, a large global health nonprofit that we’ve previously funded, revealed that there might be an opportunity to help deploy the vaccine more quickly in certain regions. PATH had been supporting the delivery of the vaccine in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi as part of the WHO-led pilot—the Malaria Vaccine Implementation Program (MVIP)–-since the pilot began in 2019.[4] In order to generate evidence about the effectiveness of the vaccine, randomly selected areas in each country received the vaccine during the early years of the pilot, while “comparison areas” would receive the vaccine at a later date, if the vaccine was recommended by the WHO.[5]
Once the vaccine had received approval from the WHO, the WHO and PATH believed there was an opportunity to build on the momentum and groundwork of the pilot to roll out the vaccine to the comparison areas as soon as possible. However, the expectation at the time
How much funding does GiveWell expect to raise through 2025?
Summary
We’re optimistic that GiveWell’s funds raised will continue to increase in the long run. Over the next few years, we believe our annual funds raised are more likely to stay relatively constant, due to a decrease in expected funding from our largest donor, Open Philanthropy, offset by an expected increase in funding from our other donors.
This chart shows our latest forecasts for total funds raised in millions of dollars: [1]
In November 2021, we wrote that we were anticipating rapid growth and aiming to influence $1 billion in 2025. Now, our best guess is that we’ll raise between $400 million and $800 million in 2025 (for comparison, we raised around $600 million in 2022). As in the chart above, we now think it’s possible but unlikely that we’ll raise close to $1 billion in 2025, and we also think it’s possible but unlikely that our funds raised in 2025 will be substantially lower (e.g. around $300 million) than they were in 2022.
We’re excited about the impact we can have at any of those levels of funding, and we’ll be continuing to direct as much funding as we can raise to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find.
Our forecasts are uncertain. We might be wrong about what the future will look like, just as our projections now are very different than they were in late 2021. We’ll have better information as time goes on.
This change in projected funds raised means that:
We’re funding-constrained: we believe that our research will yield more outstanding opportunities than we’ll be able to fund over the next few years. Your donations can help fill those gaps.
Because it’s valuable to maintain a stable cost-effectiveness bar, we may not spend down all the funds available to us in each year. Depending on how much funding we are able to direct and when it becomes available, we may smooth our spending over the next few years. Currently, we recommend funding to opportunities we believe to be at least 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers (“10x cash”).
We are increasing our emphasis on fundraising relative to past years and relative to our previous plans for 2023 to 2025 in order to increase the chances of us being able to fill additional cost-effective funding gaps.
In the rest of this post, we discuss:
Our
Givewell Blog | http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheGivewellBlogMarch 2023 open thread
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post March 2023 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Staff members’ personal donations for giving season 2022
For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years.1See our staff giving posts from 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14091_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14091_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Staff are listed alphabetically by first name.
You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry:
Andrew Martin
Audrey Cooper
Elie Hassenfeld
Erin Crossett
Isabel Arjmand
Jeremy Rehwaldt
Kameron Smith
Lauren Imholte
Maggie Lloydhauser
Natalie Crispin
Natalie Kanter
Olivia Larsen
Roman Guglielmo
Steph Stojanovic
Teryn Mattox
Andrew Martin (Senior Research Associate)
I continue to be impressed by the care and thoughtfulness I see from my colleagues in making grant allocation decisions. Seeing and participating in this work informs my decision to give all of my donation this year to the All Grants Fund. In addition to GiveWell’s Top Charities, I’m excited to be able to support other highly cost-effective programs through the All Grants Fund, as highlighted in this blog post.
Audrey Cooper (Philanthropy Advisor)
We plan to donate to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund again this year. Each of the top charity programs has substantial funding needs, such that they could reach more people and save more lives if they receive more donations. I’m excited to help these programs close the gap.
We also plan to continue our support of the International Refugee Assistance Project and criminal justice organizations. Throughout the year, we also make smaller donations to local causes (such as services for people experiencing homelessness, community gardens, etc.) as well as gifts in honor of friends to their charities of choice.
Elie Hassenfeld (Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer)
This year, my family is planning to give 80% of our annual donation to GiveWell’s All Grants Funds and 20% to GiveDirectly.
We’re giving to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund because it gives GiveWell the most flexibility to direct funds where we (GiveWell staff) think they will do the most good. This may mean supporting programs at Top Charities, but it could mean funding newer organizations, research, or more speculative opportunities that are high (expected) impact.
Our decision to give to GiveDirectly is less straightforward. Based on GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness models, the funds my family is giving to GiveDirectly would do more good if given elsewhere (roughly speaking, GiveWell’s best estimate is that
The winners of the Change Our Mind Contest—and some reflections
In September, we announced the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses. Today, we’re excited to announce the winners!
We’re very grateful that so many people engaged deeply with our work. This contest was GiveWell’s most successful effort so far to solicit external criticism from the public, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the participation of people who share our goal of allocating funding to cost-effective programs.
Overall, we received 49 entries engaging with our prompts. We were very happy with the quality of entries we received—their authors brought a great deal of thought and expertise to engaging with our cost-effectiveness analyses.
Because we were impressed by the quality of entries, we’ve decided to award two first-place prizes and eight honorable mentions. (We stated in September that we would give a minimum of one first-place, one runner-up, and one honorable mention prize.) We also awarded $20,000 to the piece of criticism that inspired this contest.
Winners are listed below, followed by our reflections on this contest and responses to the winners.
The prize-winners
Given the overall quality of the entries we received, selecting a set of winners required a lot of deliberation.
We’re still in the process of determining which critiques to incorporate into our cost-effectiveness analyses and to what extent they’ll change the bottom line; we don’t agree with all the critiques in the first-place and honorable mention entries, but each prize-winner raised issues that we believe were worth considering. In several cases, we plan to further investigate the questions raised by these entries.
Within categories, the winners are listed alphabetically by the last name of the author who submitted the entry.
First-place prizes – $20,000 each1Both of these entries were outstanding, and they represent very different approaches. Because they are similarly excellent, we are naming two winners rather than one winner and one runner-up. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14065_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14065_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
Noah Haber for “GiveWell’s Uncertainty Problem.” The author argues that without properly accounting for uncertainty, GiveWell is likely to allocate its portfolio of funding suboptimally, and proposes methods for addressing uncertainty.
Matthew Romer and Paul Romer Present for “An Examination of GiveWell’s Water Quality Intervention Cost-Effectiveness Analysis.” The authors suggest several changes to GiveWell’s analysis of water
December 2022 open thread
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post December 2022 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Our recommendations for giving in 2022
We wrote back in July that we expected to be funding-constrained this year. That remains true as we approach the end of the year, putting us in the unusual position of leaving impact on the table.
We’ve set a goal of raising $600 million in 2022, but our research team has identified $900 million in highly cost-effective funding gaps. That leaves $300 million in funding gaps unfilled. By donating this year, you can help us not only meet but exceed our goal—and say yes to more excellent opportunities to save and improve lives.
Additionally, our giving guidance for donors has changed this year. For the first time, our top recommendation is to give to our new All Grants Fund, which we allocate to any need that meets our cost-effectiveness bar. We think it’s the best bet for donors who want to support the most promising opportunities we’ve found to help people, regardless of program or location. And it reflects our current views on how we can best meet our goal of maximizing global well-being—by taking advantage of every path to impact, whether that’s funding top charities, seeding and scaling newer programs, or funding research. See below for more on all three of our giving funds.
Why your support is so important
We rely heavily on numbers to think through our funding decisions. But it’s important to remind ourselves what those numbers represent.[1] If we reach our goal of $600 million this year, we speculatively guess that that funding would save around 70,000 lives.[2] That’s approximately the population of Portland, Maine.[3]
To make the image a little more specific: we also expect most of the lives saved will be those of very young children, under five years old.[4] If they reach their fifth birthday, they’ll have a much higher chance of surviving into adulthood.[5] We think about 49,000 of the lives these donations are expected to save will be those of children under five[6]—enough to fill more than 2,000 average US primary school classrooms.[7]
But raising $600 million is not a given. We expect $350 million of our funding this year to come from Open Philanthropy, our single largest donor.[8] The rest will come from our broader community of supporters (like you!), and our projections for this category of our fundraising are fairly uncertain.
What $600
Answering some questions about water quality programs
On June 22, we held a virtual event on research into water quality interventions, featuring presentations from Michael Kremer of the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab; Brett Sedgewick from Evidence Action, the parent organization of Dispensers for Safe Water; and Stephan Guyenet, Elie Hassenfeld, and Catherine Hollander of GiveWell. (If you weren’t able to attend, we’ve published a video recording, audio recording, and transcript here.)
We hosted the event to provide some additional background for our recommendation of up to $64.7 million to Dispensers for Safe Water, which installs chlorine dispensers to treat water at rural collection sites in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda. This grant was the result of a lengthy investigation and a significant update in our views on the cost-effectiveness of water treatment, which we’ve written about here.
Several attendees wrote in with a range of thoughtful questions—about our analysis of the effects of chlorination interventions, about the particulars of Dispensers for Safe Water’s program, or more generally about our work. We covered as many as we could during the event and followed up on others by email. Below, we’re sharing a selection of the questions we responded to in writing, along with other questions we’ve gotten about this work outside of the event, in the hope that they’ll be of interest to a broader audience. Questions and answers have been anonymized; some have been edited slightly for brevity, or to fill in important context that was missing.
We always appreciate getting your questions—beyond giving us a chance to clarify our work, it provides valuable insight into what we’re not communicating as well as we could. Feel free to email us with your own questions, about water quality or anything else, at info@givewell.org. You can also comment directly on this blog post or on our most recent open thread. We aim to respond to all questions, though it may take us a few days to get back to you.
Table of contents
On Dispensers for Safe Water and our grant recommendation
Q: What kind of monitoring does Dispensers for Safe Water do to make sure its chlorine dispensers are in working order?
Q: How much would it cost to get safe water to all of the approximately two billion people who need it worldwide?
On our meta-analysis of water treatment’s effects
Q: What are the benefits
Givewell Blog | http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheGivewellBlogSeptember 2022 open thread
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post September 2022 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
The Maximum Impact Fund is now the Top Charities Fund
We’ve decided to rename the Maximum Impact Fund to better describe what opportunities this fund supports. The Maximum Impact Fund will now be called the Top Charities Fund.
We recently announced changes to our top charity criteria that include a new requirement for our top charities: that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectations about the impact of their programs. Alongside this update, we also introduced a new giving option, the All Grants Fund. The All Grants Fund supports the full range of GiveWell’s grantmaking and can be allocated to any grant that meets our cost-effectiveness bar—including opportunities outside of our top charities and riskier grants with high expected value.1The expected value of a grant is the value of the grant’s outcomes multiplied by the probability that those outcomes will be realized. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_13910_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13910_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });
The new All Grants Fund is a complement to what we have called our Maximum Impact Fund, which is granted to cost-effective opportunities among our top charities. However, we’ve received feedback that describing the fund that supports grantmaking only to our top charities as having “Maximum Impact” is confusing in light of the opportunity to support a wider range of opportunities (with potentially higher expected value) through the All Grants Fund.
Based on this feedback, we’ve decided to change the name of the Maximum Impact Fund to the Top Charities Fund.
Only the name is changing—we aren’t making any further changes to the underlying fund beyond those discussed in our previous post, so any incoming donations designated for the Maximum Impact Fund will automatically be allocated to the Top Charities Fund. We will continue to use donations to this fund to support the highest-priority funding needs among our top charities each quarter. As before, we will apply the same cost-effectiveness bar across our grantmaking, regardless of whether the funding comes from the All Grants Fund or Top Charities Fund.
We appreciate everyone who provided feedback and hope that the new name provides more clarity about how donations to our funds will be used.
More details about our funds and their impact are here.
Notes[+] Notes
↑1 The expected value of a grant is the value
Givewell Blog | http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheGivewellBlogAnnouncing the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses
We’re extremely excited to be announcing the Change Our Mind Contest to encourage critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses that could lead to substantial improvements of our overall allocation of funds. For all the details, see this page.
Cost-effectiveness is the single most important input in our decisions about what programs to recommend, and we believe it’s possible that we’re missing important considerations or making mistakes that lead us to allocate funding suboptimally. We’ve been excited to see people engaging with our cost-effectiveness analyses, and we’d like to inspire more of that engagement.
With that in mind, we’re inviting you to identify potentially important mistakes or weaknesses in our existing cost-effectiveness analyses and tell us about them!
The first-place winning entry will receive $20,000, the runner-up will receive $10,000, and the honorable mention will receive $5,000. We may offer multiple runner-up and honorable mention prizes if the quality of submissions is particularly high. All other entries that meet our criteria will receive a participation prize of $500, capped at a total of 50 participation prizes for the first 50 submissions.
In addition to the monetary prizes, excellent entries may lead to changes in how we allocate millions of dollars of funding, leading to more lives saved or improved.
Entries must be received by October 31, 2022, and the requirements are described in detail on the contest page. We will announce winners by December 15, 2022, and will publish the winning entries online.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment on this post or email change-our-mind@givewell.org.
We’re running this contest because the recommendation decisions we make are extremely important, and we want to incentivize feedback that will improve our work, thereby enabling us to do more good. We hope you’ll consider participating!
The post Announcing the Change Our Mind Contest for critiques of our cost-effectiveness analyses appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Our UK supporters can now make tax-deductible donations through GiveWell UK
GiveWell UK is now fully registered as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation in the United Kingdom. Our UK supporters now have a tax-deductible option for donating directly to GiveWell!
The basics
We’ve launched GiveWell UK as a UK Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO), with the registered charity number 1196392, and the official UK partner of GiveWell. Beginning with the 2022 tax year, eligible UK taxpayers may take tax deductions for donations to GiveWell UK.1This information shouldn’t be construed as tax advice. We recommend you consult a professional if you have questions about your taxes. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_13871_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13871_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); These donations are also eligible for Gift Aid.
GiveWell UK donations may be directed toward GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund (MIF), All Grants Fund, top charities, or unrestricted support for GiveWell’s US operations. Donations will be granted out on a quarterly basis in line with the recommendations of GiveWell’s US-based research team, upon the approval of GiveWell UK’s trustees (more here).
Why we registered in the UK
GiveWell has been exploring registration in countries outside the US, and UK donors are one of our largest groups of international donors; we estimate about 5% of our donors are based in the UK. The launch of GiveWell UK means that these supporters can enjoy a tax benefit without having to give through an intermediary. It also opens up possible additional funding for GiveWell through Gift Aid, a UK government program that allows GiveWell UK to claim an extra 25% on top of eligible donations at no cost to donors (more here).
How to donate
We accept donations to GiveWell UK via credit card, PayPal, direct debit, wire transfer, and other options listed here. We’re currently unable to accept donations by physical check, or gifts of cryptocurrency or securities.
Information for donors in other countries
GiveWell is a registered charity in the US and the Netherlands, and GiveWell UK is registered in the United Kingdom. Donors in other countries who want to get a tax benefit for supporting GiveWell can do so through a network of aligned organizations that direct donations to the Maximum Impact Fund, our top charities, and/or GiveWell operations support. See here for a list of such organizations by country.
More resources
For more
Changes to our top charity criteria, and a new giving option
Since 2007, GiveWell has maintained a list of top charities. The organizations and programs on that list have changed over time, but the goal has remained the same: to help donors decide where to give.
In service of that goal, we’ve spent roughly the last year working on a plan to add to and update our criteria for top charities, so that they accurately reflect our prioritization of funding opportunities and are more helpful to donors. The revised criteria emphasize programs from which we expect high impact, with the additional requirement that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectation.
We hope these changes will also draw a brighter line for donors between our top charities and other excellent funding opportunities we support, a distinction that we haven’t always made clear. Recognizing that some donors want to contribute to grants outside our top charities list, we’re also introducing a new giving option: the All Grants Fund. Providing this option as a complement to the Maximum Impact Fund is an important step as grants to programs outside our top charities become a bigger part of our work.
In this post, we will:
Explain why we are making these changes
Share our updated criteria and our updated top charities list
Explain how these changes affect donors’ giving options
Why we’re revising our top charity criteria
Our top charities list—and by association the Maximum Impact Fund—is often the first thing that people encounter when they’re introduced to GiveWell. We want it to be easy to understand why these programs are on our list.
Additionally, our top charity programs should reflect the kinds of giving opportunities that people are seeking from such a list. After soliciting feedback, we believe that most donors are looking for opportunities that are both high-impact (i.e., GiveWell expects donations will do a lot of good per dollar) and high-confidence (i.e., GiveWell is relatively sure that that expectation will bear out).[1]
By adding criteria that are more specific, we also hope to establish clearer guidance on when programs should be added or removed.
Our revised criteria
Previously, we listed four criteria for top charities: evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, room for more funding, and transparency. These continue to be the criteria we’ll use to evaluate funding opportunities, but they no longer fully describe the few programs that we consider top
GiveWell’s 2021 metrics report
In 2021, GiveWell directed the largest amount of money in our history, over $500 million, which we believe will be beneficial or life saving to many people in need. We thank our donors for continuing to trust us to find and recommend some of the most highly cost-effective giving opportunities in the world.
Note that this year, we’ve also updated our metrics report to more clearly communicate about our work. Previously, we reported on our “money moved,” a metric that tried to provide a composite picture of both the funds we raised and directed in a given year. However, starting with our 2021 report, we’ll be reporting on these metrics separately as “funds raised” and “funds directed,” which we believe will be simpler and clearer.
The following tables summarize our funds raised and funds directed in 2021:
This represents a significant increase in the funds we raise on a yearly basis, from only $11 million in 2012 to $595 million in 2021.
You’ll note that our funds directed in 2021 is about $66 million lower than our funds raised. The funds we raised that were not directed include:
“Contingency funds” committed to charities under particular grant agreements but only paid out under certain conditions of the grant. (If those conditions are not met, we reallocate the funding to other opportunities.)
“Rollover funds” saved for grantmaking in future years.
Maximum Impact Fund donations raised in a given metrics year but allocated in the following year (these appear as funds directed in the following year).
Unrestricted funds raised in a given metrics year but not spent on operations or granted out to charities in that year (these appear as funds directed in the year they are allocated).
For more information, please see our full report.
The post GiveWell’s 2021 metrics report appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
An update on GiveWell’s funding projections
As little as six months ago, we were in the position of having more funding available than we could spend on opportunities that met our very high cost-effectiveness bar. Today, the opposite is true—we don’t expect to have enough funding to support all the cost-effective opportunities we find.
In this post we will:
provide an update on GiveWell’s projected funding position,
explain how we have been successful in identifying cost-effective opportunities, and
share our initial thoughts about what this update means for GiveWell’s forward-looking grantmaking strategy.
The state of funding
We wrote last year that we would roll over approximately $110 million in funding from 2021 to spend this year. We ultimately rolled over substantially less because we were imprecise in calculating our projected funds in and out (more details available on our mistakes page). But at a high level, it remained true that we received more money than we chose to spend on highly cost-effective funding opportunities.
We expected to be in a similar position this year, rolling over approximately $110 million. We now believe that we will be funding constrained. There are two core reasons for this:
We found a lot more cost-effective opportunities that need funding. Based on our current research pipeline, we think we’ll be able to recommend up to approximately $750 million in grants that are at least 6x as cost-effective as cash transfers.1We compare charities (and funding opportunities within them) using multiples of our estimate for the impact of directly transferring cash to beneficiaries. For example, we describe an opportunity as “6x cash” to indicate that we think it’s six times as cost-effective as giving that amount in cash directly to the beneficiary. There’s an intuitive case for asking whether a program is better than what beneficiaries would buy for themselves using cash. If not, wouldn’t it be better to just give them cash instead? Any program we consider must exceed this standard and be multiple times better than cash in order for us to recommend it. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_13763_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13763_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); Last year, we identified about $500 million in grants, most of which were at least 8x.
We think we will receive less money than we projected due to recent
June 2022 open thread
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post June 2022 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Neil Buddy Shah has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative
I am excited to share that GiveWell Managing Director Buddy Shah has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a major global health organization working across a range of issues including malaria prevention and maternal and neonatal health. This news is bittersweet for me. I’m sad to be losing the talent, advice, and thought partnership Buddy brought to GiveWell, but I’m thrilled that he is taking up this position—the global health sector will be stronger for it.
CHAI is gaining a great leader in Buddy. But perhaps more importantly for GiveWell and our supporters, this appointment is a signal that effective giving is contributing to more corners of the global health landscape than ever before. Buddy is a strong champion of impact maximization, and I am excited that he will apply this lens in his new role.
I am also pleased that this transition does not mark the end of Buddy’s relationship with GiveWell. It is important that GiveWell maintain strong connections with leading organizations in the global health sector. With Buddy at the helm of CHAI, there will be another important voice advocating for programs that increase health outcomes as much as possible per dollar spent.
We wish our best to Buddy in his new role, and we look forward to maximizing impact together for many years to come.
The post Neil Buddy Shah has been appointed CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
A major update in our assessment of water quality interventions
As we continue to grow, GiveWell seeks to maximize both the cost-effectiveness of the funding we direct and the likely room for more funding of the programs we support. We think we’ve identified a category of interventions that rates really well on both: water treatment, such as chlorination.
This is a major update for us. Before 2020, based on the available evidence, we didn’t believe that water quality interventions had a large enough effect on mortality to make them a competitive target for funding. We’ve since seen new evidence that has led us to significantly increase our estimate of the mortality reduction in young children that’s attributable to these interventions: a 14% reduction in mortality from any cause,[1] up from around 3%.
Though we have remaining uncertainties about these numbers, we’ve substantially updated our view of the promisingness of water treatment. Where we previously found that Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water program was about as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers, we now believe it’s about four to eight times as cost-effective, depending on the location. That was a primary factor in our decision to recommend a grant of up to $64.7 million to Dispensers for Safe Water in January 2022.
We’re sharing this news in brief form before we’ve published a grant page, because we’re excited about the potential of this grant and what it represents. It’s an area of work we haven’t supported to a significant degree in the past, but one that we now think could absorb hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for cost-effective programming.
The problem and the intervention
In low-income settings, contaminated water is a major cause of diarrhea, a leading cause of death in children under five years old.[2] Several interventions exist to either purify water or protect it from contamination in the first place, but chlorination has a number of features that made it an attractive intervention for us to explore: it is inexpensive and widely used, several charities are already set up to implement it, and the technology behind it is well established.[3]
Chlorine is well-known as a disinfectant; it reacts with disease-causing microorganisms in water, inactivating viruses and bacteria.[4] There is evidence that chlorination programs, such as distributing chlorine to households, reduce diarrhea in children, but there had been scant evidence that such
March 2022 open thread
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post March 2022 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.