The GiveWell Blog

Potential global catastrophic risk focus areas

Updated Sept. 12, 2014 to change “GiveWell Labs” to “Open Philanthropy Project,” in line with our August 2014 announcement.Throughout the post, “we” refers to GiveWell and Good Ventures, who work as partners on the Open Philanthropy Project. This post draws substantially on our recent updates on our investigation of policy-oriented philanthropy, including using much of the same…

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Update on GiveDirectly

Three members of GiveDirectly‘s board of directors (Paul Niehaus, Michael Faye, and Chris Hughes) are planning to start a for-profit technology company, Segovia, aimed at improving the efficiency of cash transfer distributions in the developing world. Segovia plans to sell software to developing-country governments for use in implementing their cash transfer programs. This development was…

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Sequence thinking vs. cluster thinking

Note: this is an unusually long and abstract post whose primary purpose is to help a particular subset of our audience understand our style of reasoning. It does not contain substantive updates on our research and recommendations. GiveWell – both our traditional work and GiveWell Labs – is fundamentally about maximization: doing as much good as…

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Reflections on a site visit in Myanmar (Burma)

This is a cross-post from Good Ventures’ blog Give & Learn. It was co-authored by Cari Tuna, Good Ventures Co-Founder, and Natalie Crispin, GiveWell Research Analyst. We recently traveled to Myanmar to visit a project Good Ventures is supporting to help prevent the spread of drug-resistant malaria. This post shares some observations from the trip…

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