The GiveWell Blog

Global Fund: Best failure disclosure we’ve seen yet?

Over the last year or so, The Global Fund has disclosed instances of apparent fraud in Zambia, Mali, and Mauritania among other countries. This week, The Associated Press reported on these disclosures with the hostile headline: “Fraud plagues global health fund.” The Global Fund has been defended with the valid observation that the total fraud…

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Free legal services – helpful or harmful?

The Harvard Legal Aid Bureau provides free legal services, via volunteer Harvard Law students, to “low-income people in civil (non-criminal) matters in order to ensure equal access to justice and to remove legal barriers to economic opportunity.” It’s about as intuitive an intervention as any. Good legal services are expensive; the services provided by Harvard…

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Disaster relief report published; Doctors Without Borders, Partners In Health, and Direct Relief International stand out

Our new report grades major disaster relief organizations on their transparency and accountability to donors. It provides detailed reports on each charity, a summary table with our conclusions, and the full details of our process. We conclude that Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health and Direct Relief International stand out for the clarity with which…

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What is the situation in Haiti a year after the earthquake? What have and haven’t charities accomplished so far?

Yesterday we discussed how much has been raised and spent for Haiti relief. Today we’ll summarize what we know about how the relief effort has progressed over the last year. Our detailed and sourced account of the relief effort as a whole will be available by the end of today, and linked here when it…

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How much money has been given and spent for Haiti earthquake relief? Putting the numbers in perspective

We’ll soon be releasing an assessment of disaster relief organizations. Though we haven’t found it practical (yet) to evaluate the effectiveness of their work, we’d like to take a broad look at what the relief effort as a whole has and hasn’t accomplished, and for how much money. This post focuses on the latter: how…

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Assessing disaster relief organizations

Over the past year, we have been examining disaster relief organizations, with particular attention to the quality of the information they provide on their work in the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake. We don’t think disaster relief is the best cause for impact-oriented donors and we are unable (details below) to apply…

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