The GiveWell Blog

Re-evaluating the Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers

| by GiveWell Staff

This year, we re-evaluated the cost effectiveness of direct cash transfers as implemented by our friends at GiveDirectly. Our complete writeup is here, and full of fascinating details, but the main headline is: we now estimate that GiveDirectly’s flagship cash program is 3 to 4 times more cost-effective than we’d previously estimated.

It is important to note two things: (1) this won’t alter our Top Charities list or our grantmaking—we believe that the programs we currently direct funding to are at least twice as cost-effective as this new estimate, so we don’t expect to support GiveDirectly’s flagship program in the near term; and (2) this update is the result of re-evaluating the evidence underpinning GiveDirectly’s program, which we hadn’t formally done since 2019—the structure of GiveDirectly’s program has not changed (though they are now carrying it out in more locations since our last evaluation).

We share more information about our research below. You can read our full, detailed report here. You can read GiveDirectly’s blog post on our re-evaluation here.

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Making Predictions about Our Grants

| by Hannah Bell

From sports announcers to political pundits to friends gossipping about romantic interests, lots of people make probabilistic predictions about the future. But only some actually follow up to see how well their predictions performed. For instance, you may have heard that weather forecasters predicted that the 2024 hurricane season had an 85% chance of being more active than normal and there would be 17 to 25 named storms. But in September, they were surprised that so far, it had been unexpectedly quiet, with climate change likely affecting weather patterns in ways scientists don’t fully understand.

GiveWell researchers often make forecasts about activities, milestones, and outcomes of the programs and research studies we recommend funding for, as well as decisions that GiveWell will make in the future. For example, we might forecast whether we’ll fund more hospital programs to implement Kangaroo Mother Care programs by 2027, or whether data collected about how many people are using chlorinated water will align with our expectations.

As a way to solicit external feedback on some of our predictions, we just launched a page on Metaculus, an online forecasting platform. Periodically, we will post forecasts there about GiveWell’s research and grants for the public to make their own predictions. Metaculus and other contributors will award $2,250 in prizes to people who leave insightful comments on a select group of forecasting questions. The deadline for comments is December 1, 2024.

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How Do You Value Information?

| by Uri Bram

There’s a common piece of dating advice: before you commit, go on a big trip together. Hopefully the trip itself will be fun, but that’s (almost) beside the point: the real goal is to figure out how smoothly you solve problems together. When it starts raining at 10pm on a Friday and you’re caught outdoors because of a misread-map incident (if we’re being honest: entirely your fault), you’re going to learn a lot about whether your partner reacts to difficulties in a way you’d like to be around for the rest of your life.

The value of what you learn from the trip (a concept called “value of information,” or VOI) can far exceed the direct costs and benefits, because the trip is just for a week and the rest of your life is, well, the rest of your life. If there’s a 10% chance that the trip will show you that you’re not truly compatible, the expected value of that information is higher than any plausible level of (un)happiness you might experience on the trip itself.

Sometimes, the value of information makes the trip worth taking when it wouldn’t have been otherwise—your partner has already scheduled a trip during their time off and it’s very inconvenient for you to join them, but the value of information makes the trip worth it. Other times, you can make choices about the trip in order to increase the value of information you’ll receive: perhaps an all-inclusive beach resort would be more enjoyable today, but a road trip where you camp at different spots each night has a higher value of information and so is ultimately more valuable.

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Research Strategy: Nutrition

| by Marinella Capriati

GiveWell has made several grants in the nutrition space to date—we’ve funded vitamin A supplementation through Helen Keller International for many years, and have made grants supporting both iron fortification and supplementation and community-based management of acute malnutrition. This year, we started systematically exploring nutrition as a grantmaking area.

Our key goal for the year is to learn more about the space. To discipline ourselves, we put down a few hypotheses about nutrition grantmaking. It is quite likely we will change our mind on these as we learn more.

Hypothesis 1: Iron and vitamin A deficiency are the most promising areas for grantmaking

Overall, we think iron and vitamin A deficiency are the most promising areas for grantmaking because of their high burden and because there are programs (fortification and supplementation) that offer tractable and cost-effective ways of addressing this burden.

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Finding and Vaccinating More Children

| by GiveWell Staff

We’re crossposting the first part of a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives aims to increase vaccination coverage in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers.

We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. However, we hope that this post, about New Incentives’ efforts to reach zero-dose children, can provide another angle for understanding the efforts of our Top Charities.

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Including GiveWell on Your Wedding Registry

| by Chandler Brotak

Planning a wedding is stressful. Questions around who to invite, what to eat, where to take pictures, what kind of music to play—the list goes on and on. But when Lucie and Geoff started planning their big day, at least one element was a no-brainer.

A fundraiser for GiveWell would serve as their wedding registry.

“I think we were pretty aligned since the beginning that we didn’t want to get gifts,” says Lucie. With successful careers and after living together for several years, the couple didn’t feel the need for a traditional wedding registry with household items. Offering a fundraiser instead allowed guests to contribute whatever felt reasonable to them, avoiding the social and financial pressures of buying a registry item.

Lucie and Geoff’s wedding was held in the Czech Republic with a blend of Czech and American guests, and the two cultures celebrate weddings differently—weddings in the US often involve gifts for the couple, while wedding guests in the Czech Republic often bring envelopes of cash instead. “It just seemed better for everyone to have a unified outlet.”

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