GiveWell Incubation Grants have become an increasingly substantial part of our work, and our impression is that not everyone who follows GiveWell is familiar with this program. This blog post is intended to (a) briefly explain and outline our main goals and expectations for this work, and (b) share some updates on promising organizations that have been supported by Incubation Grants.

The goal of GiveWell Incubation Grants (previously known as GiveWell’s experimental work) is to support the development of future top charities and improve our understanding of our current top charities. We plan to do this in a few ways (not an exclusive list):

1. Increasing the body of evidence around potential top charities and priority programs;
2. Providing early-stage support for new organizations;
3. Supporting improved monitoring and evaluation for potential or current top charities.

Good Ventures, a foundation with which we work closely, has funded the grants made as part of this work, which are listed here.

Promising investigations

Due to the nature of this support—early-stage funding, intended to allow an organization to develop a stronger track record or to collect more evidence on a promising program—we don’t expect Incubation Grants to produce new top charities over very short time horizons. We expect there will be, in many cases, a period of multiple years between a grant and an organization or intervention being considered a potential top charity or priority program.

This post highlights grants that we don’t expect to lead to top charities before 2018. It should provide a reasonable overview of the type of grants we’re excited to recommend as part of this work. Future posts will highlight the organizations we’re closely tracking as potential 2017 top charities (No Lean Season and Zusha!).[1]

This post will discuss Incubation Grants to:

• IDinsight
• New Incentives
• Results for Development (R4D)
• Charity Science: Health
• Mindset engagement for cash transfers
• Incentives for immunization studies

IDinsight
IDinsight supports and conducts rigorous evaluations of development interventions with an explicit focus on providing useful data to inform funders and policymakers. Good Ventures made a $1.985 million grant to IDinsight for general support in June 2016 as part of GiveWell Incubation Grants.

In conversations with our network, we’ve often heard that IDinsight fills a unique gap in the development sector. There are other organizations that conduct research and advocate for evidence-based decision-making, but our impression is that IDinsight is currently the one most focused on research whose primary goal is to help decision-makers with specific decisions (in contrast to e.g. academic merit). We have seen some indications of other organizations moving in a similar direction, however. We hope that this grant allows IDinsight to grow its staff and take on more projects. IDinsight’s work has the potential to inform GiveWell’s list of top charities by increasing the body of evidence around potential priority programs and improving available monitoring and evaluation information around specific organizations.

Recently, Good Ventures made an additional grant to IDinsight to support an “embedded IDinsight team” for GiveWell top charities, i.e., a small group of IDinsight staff explicitly focused on supporting the creation of high-quality monitoring and evidence for current and future GiveWell top charities. For example, IDinsight may work with New Incentives to run an impact study, and possibly a randomized controlled trial (RCT), on its pilot program to incentivize immunization. Another possible project for the embedded team is conducting monitoring and evaluation of cataract surgery programs, which could improve our understanding of the efficacy of the program and whether we should recommend charities that work on it. Additional possible projects for the IDinsight embedded team are discussed here.

We don’t expect a new GiveWell top charity to originate from this work in 2017, but hope that it will inform our future recommendations.

New Incentives
We made three Incubation Grants to New Incentives for its conditional cash transfer program aimed at preventing mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV and encouraging pregnant women to deliver in health facilities (e.g., rather than at home). We decided not to recommend New Incentives’ PMTCT and facility delivery program as a 2016 top charity due to insufficient evidence supporting the program, although we were impressed by the organization’s staff. We wrote about this decision at length in this blog post.

With our encouragement, New Incentives shifted its focus to a new program, conditional cash transfers to incentivize immunizations in Nigeria. We’re planning to follow its work on this program as a potential future top charity, although we do not consider it likely to become a GiveWell-recommended charity in 2017.

Results for Development (R4D)
Pneumonia is one of the leading killers of children worldwide, and our impression is that there is no dedicated funding stream for its treatment (as there is for other major diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria). R4D is implementing a program to increase use of amoxicillin, the World Health Organization-recommended first-line treatment, to treat childhood pneumonia in Tanzania. In May 2016, Good Ventures provided $6.4 million to support this program as part of GiveWell Incubation Grants.

We have a positive view of R4D as an organization: its staff, evidence-driven approach, and transparency. We also believe that the use of amoxicillin to treat childhood pneumonia could be competitive with our current priority programs. Our key question around this program as a possible GiveWell top charity is monitoring and evaluation. We’re unsure whether R4D’s monitoring will lead us to feel confident that children sick with pneumonia actually receive treatment. This is due to the complex nature of the intervention, which may make it more challenging to collect high-quality monitoring data comparable with that of our current top charities.

We currently expect that R4D will have the data available to potentially qualify as a top charity in 2018 or 2019 and we hope to evaluate it then.

Charity Science: Health
Charity Science: Health was founded by members of the effective altruism community with the explicit goal of creating a GiveWell top charity. Charity Science: Health plans to send SMS text reminders for vaccinations due to the strong evidence base they see for this program in increasing immunization rates. Good Ventures made a grant of $200,000 to support the first year of the organization’s work in India.

Because we have not yet vetted the relevant evidence closely, we remain unsure about whether we would recommend SMS reminders as a priority program. Charity Science: Health has been transparent and communicative with us, and we expect to learn from its work. Charity Science: Health is also a young organization with a very short track record, and we don’t anticipate evaluating it as a top charity until 2018 or 2019.

Mindset engagement for cash transfers
GiveDirectly, one of GiveWell’s top charities, provides unconditional cash transfers to very poor individuals in East Africa. In May 2016, Good Ventures made a $350,000 grant to Innovations for Poverty Action to support an RCT—in collaboration with GiveDirectly—testing whether “mindset engagement” approaches to cash transfers, such as watching an inspirational film or meeting with a counselor, affects the outcomes for cash transfer recipients by changing the framing of the transfer and thus how it is spent. The approaches are aimed at encouraging recipients to use the transfers to pursue their goals by increasing their sense of self-efficacy and understanding of their opportunities, which—according to the researchers’ theory—may have been adversely impacted by time spent in poverty. This study could influence the work of one of our current top charities (GiveDirectly) or our understanding of cash transfers as a priority program.

Incentives for immunization studies
In 2015, Good Ventures made two $100,000 grants to support further study of whether providing incentives for immunization could increase vaccination rates. These grants were made as part of our work to grow the body of evidence around promising programs that could become potential GiveWell priority programs.

The Incubation Grants were made to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Interactive Research and Development (IRD) to support high-quality replications of a promising study on the impact of providing non-cash incentives, such as grocery vouchers, for parents to vaccinate their children. The replication studies are being conducted in India and Pakistan.

We are unsure when the results of these studies will be available.

Other work to support potential future top charities

Evidence Action, the parent organization of GiveWell top charity Deworm the World Initiative as well as No Lean Season, a GiveWell Incubation Grant recipient, recently announced a call for results of RCTs and other rigorous empirical studies that demonstrated a positive impact of an intervention benefiting poor households, and is planning to fund 3-6 of these proposals for further research. We’re excited to see this announcement and expect the results may further our understanding of potential GiveWell priority programs.

Full list of GiveWell Incubation Grants

A full list of grants we’ve recommended is available at www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants.

If you know of a strong proposal for a potential GiveWell Incubation Grant, please email applications@givewell.org. We’d be particularly interested in new groups that work on promising programs for which we have not found charity implementers.

Notes

[1] In December, we recommended a grant of $900,000 to gui2de to scale up its Zusha! road-safety programs. This grant write-up is not yet public, but notes from our initial conversations with Zusha! are available here and here.