The GiveWell Blog

The process of giving: A personal story (guest post from Ian Turner)

This is a guest post from Ian Turner about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. Ian and GiveWell staff had several in-depth conversations as he worked through his decision, so we invited him to share his thought process here. Note that GiveWell has made minor editing suggestions for this…

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Engineers Without Borders earns “Notable” distinction

Engineers Without Borders is a group we’ve never encountered before, focused on “enabling rural Africans the opportunity to access clean water, generate an income from humble farms, and access critical infrastructure and services.” (Here’s a list of its projects in Africa.) This group deserves recognition for doing the simplest thing guaranteed to improve GiveWell’s view…

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LAPO: Case study on due diligence by microfinance funders

Updated 10/19/10 to reflect new information, submitted by a Grameen Foundation representative, regarding encouraging developments on LAPO since mid-year. To be clear, we stand by the main message of this post, which is not about LAPO’s current situation but about its funders’ and partners’ behavior over the last several years, prior to the public controversy…

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More on charity ratings and GiveWell’s mission

Last week we wrote that we are likely going to stop giving zero-to-three-star ratings to charities. Some praised the decision, while others offered suggestions for how to resolve the problems we listed with ratings (we responded to the suggestions in the thread). While we went into a lot of detail on the problems with ratings,…

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