The GiveWell Blog

Update: Against Malaria Foundation’s costs

We learned last week that we underestimated the total cost of the Against Malaria Foundation’s insecticide-treated net distribution. A nonprofit interested in reducing costs for its own model read our AMF review and contacted AMF and Concern Universal (AMF’s distribution partner in Malawi). The nonprofit representative noticed that Concern’s costs seemed lower than he expected,…

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GiveWell’s plan for 2012: Specifics of research

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We previously laid out our high-level priorities for 2012. The top two priorities are “make significant progress on GiveWell Labs” and “find more outstanding giving opportunities under the same basic framework as our existing recommendations.” This post elaborates on our plans…

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GiveWell’s plan for 2012: Top-level priorities

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] In previous posts, we discussed the progress we’ve made, where we stand, and how we can improve in core areas. This post focuses on the latter, and lays out our top-level strategic choices for the next year. The big pictureBroadly, we…

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Self-evaluation: GiveWell as a project

This is the fourth post (of six) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. This post answers a set of critical questions for GiveWell stakeholders. The questions are the same as last year’s. Is GiveWell’s research process “robust,” i.e., can it be continued and maintained without relying on the co-Founders? Where…

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Review of Due Diligence, by David Roodman

Due Diligence is a new book on microfinance by David Roodman. We are fans of Mr. Roodman’s work in general (we’ve previously interviewed him for our blog, discussed his research and quoted him for a testimonial), so we were eager to read this book. We weren’t disappointed: it’s thorough, it examines the case for microfinance…

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