Investigating the cause of orphans and vulnerable children would mean trying to understand (perhaps from, for example, speaking with government agencies that refer them to nonprofits) when and where there are orphans and vulnerable children who lack appropriate support services, and thus trying to understand where more orphanages or support services are needed. This is not easy or necessarily feasible, but if we could come to this understanding, we wouldn’t need much information from orphanages themselves, and that’s important because it’s usually at the stage of getting information directly from charities that things become most difficult.

Jonah: I think all the factors you name are relevant, including the raising of our bar.

• We’re always going to compare charities against the best we’ve found. So it isn’t that we’ve set a certain bar and only VillageReach cleared it; it’s that the gap between our #1 and the rest happens to be large.
• VillageReach is unusual in a lot of ways, in terms of timing as well as in terms of activities/evaluation. It is a small organization that has had one well-demonstrated success but hasn’t yet scaled it up. That’s arguably a “sweet spot” for casual donors, because there is neither the uncertainty that comes with an entirely new project nor the uncertainty that comes with the size and bureaucracy of a scaled-up organization. And it’s my view that in charity, the effect of brand and peer pressure creates fast and uncontrolled jumps from “new and unestablished” to “dramatically overfunded to the point of departing far from the original vision.” So VillageReach is at a particular stage that most charities don’t seem to stay at for long, and it may have stayed at this stage longer than most because of struggles in storytelling – i.e., the unusual difficulty of fundraising for it may be a factor behind its unusually high appeal to us and our donors. Finally, it has an aptitude for meaningful evaluation and a commitment to transparency that we’ve found rare.
• Since the beginning of the project, we’ve preferred “false negatives” (failing to recommend good charities) to “false positives” (recommending weak charities), which has led us to err on the side of having overly strict and limited criteria. The more we learn, the more different ways we come up with to identify a charity as outstanding, and the more we can broaden. So the fact that there’s only one charity we really feel good about is partly a statement about our own knowledge and experience (though it is also a statement about the sector).

Taking these considerations together, the fact that we’ve only found one VillageReach to date doesn’t seem particularly shocking or puzzling to me.

As for why VillageReach has had trouble getting funding from elsewhere, we’ve speculated that it has to do with the difficulty of storytelling for this kind of work (relevant for all donors but especially individuals) and the fact that it’s looking to scale up a project of its own (which makes it unattractive to most institutional funders). Note, however, that it does still receive funding from both Mulago and Skoll and that both of these organizations tend to keep their gifts to any particular organization within a pretty consistent range.

One point that one of you raised in your most recent board meeting is that there’s a question of why GiveWell has found only one VillageReach.

I’ve been wondering about this for the past few months. A priori it seems unlikely that there would be exactly one charity meeting GiveWell’s criteria – one would either expect zero charities meeting the criteria or multiple charities meeting the criteria.

One hypothetical narrative that could describe the situation here is that GiveWell is setting the bar for top rated charities based on the top charity that it sees. This is somewhat consistent with November 24th blog post:

Part of what’s going on here is a gradual raising of our bar, as we have capacity for more analysis and a substantially higher opinion of our top-rated charity VillageReach than we had last year.

But on the other hand there seems to be a pretty substantial gap between VillageReach and GiveWell’s silver medal rated international charities – I say this both based on my own impression having read this review and with a quote from Holden’s February 4th blog post

When the 2010 holiday season was approaching, and we started thinking about our strategy for outreach, we realized that we only had one charity we could personally feel really good about aggressively raising money for. While we think all our recommended charities stand well above other donors’ options, it was only VillageReach for which I felt I could sit down with someone face-to-face about and say, “Give as much as you can to this one.”

Why? Because not only does VillageReach have outstanding evidence of effectiveness; it has outstanding bang-for-the-buck (in absolute terms, not just relative terms) and most importantly, it has a concrete plan for additional funding.

We personally don’t like raising money for groups that we can’t say all these things about. We’re happy to provide our recommendations for someone looking for the best microfinance charity, but we can’t honestly say that we think dollars given to it are accomplishing as much good as possible.

Several possible interpretations here:

1. VillageReach is a “once in a blue moon” type opportunity for casual donors to do good; it’s unrealistic to expect comparable opportunities for casual donors on a regular basis.

2. GiveWell’s criteria are overly rigid in ways not necessarily correlated opportunities for casual donors doing the most good.

3. Thus far, venues where GiveWell has looked for quality charities are suboptimal; there are other places to look that would yield more fruitful results.

I have a poor sense of the relevance of each of the above mentioned factors. The above post seems to focus on (3), but maybe it’s worth considering (1) and (2) as well.

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A question strongly related to that of why GiveWell has found only one VillageReach is the question of why VillageReach wasn’t able to secure adequate funding without GiveWell’s help. VillageReach’s pilot project was funded by the Gates Foundation. Why didn’t the Gates Foundation continue to fully fund VillageReach after the pilot project was successful?

I have guesses of my own, and maybe one issue is that the foundations are not explicit about their reasons for funding the projects that they do; but it would be good to get a better picture of the reasons why VillageReach had difficulty bridging its funding gap in absence of GiveWell – it seems like thinking about this might point a way toward finding other opportunities to fund outstanding organizations with room for more funding.

Saundra has written extensively about orphanages; perhaps the most important of these posts is “Does funding orphanages create orphans?“.