Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
The GiveWell Blog
Allocation of discretionary funds from Q1 2019
In the first quarter of 2019, donors gave a combined $4.7 million for granting to recommended charities at our discretion.
We really appreciate the generosity of our supporters in making it possible for us to regularly allocate funding to the top charity or charities that we believe can best use additional funding. Thank you!
In this post, we discuss our decision to allocate this $4.7 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), as well as the process we followed to arrive at this decision.
We continue to recommend that donors giving to GiveWell choose the option on our donation form for “grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding needs. For donors who prefer to give to a specific charity, we note that if we had additional funds to allocate at this time, we would very likely allocate them to AMF, which we believe could use additional funding for highly cost-effective work, even after receiving the $4.7 million in funding mentioned above.
Our bottom line
As we did last quarter, we focused our efforts on deciding between allocating funding to Malaria Consortium vs. AMF. We currently believe that AMF has a more time sensitive funding need than Malaria Consortium, and our best guess is that it will have equivalent impact per dollar to Malaria Consortium. This led us to allocate funding to AMF.
Evidence Action is shutting down No Lean Season
This post discusses a set of issues with Evidence Action’s No Lean Season program. No Lean Season is a former GiveWell top charity and GiveWell Incubation Grant recipient. It is now shutting down. Evidence Action discusses its decision in this blog post.
Here, we share a significant amount of detail about this decision and the factors that contributed. Proactively sharing detailed information about a charity’s shortcomings may be unusual, but it is core to GiveWell’s mission. We are dedicated to transparency about our recommendations—the good and the bad.
Evidence Action has reviewed this post, and we’ve discussed our thinking at length with its senior leadership; however, the views expressed are our own. We have been impressed with Evidence Action’s commitment to transparency and continue to support its other work. These updates have not substantially changed our view of Evidence Action; we expect large programs to experience problems, to a certain extent. We believe Evidence Action responded to these problems responsibly, although we have several open questions.
Summary
Evidence Action is shutting down No Lean Season, a former GiveWell top charity that distributed no-interest subsidies to support seasonal migration in Bangladesh.
As we have discussed previously, a study of the No Lean Season program in 2017 found disappointing results; this led to our removal of No Lean Season, in agreement with Evidence Action, from our list of top charities.
In early 2019, Evidence Action’s senior leadership received allegations that a junior employee of the government agency in Bangladesh responsible for approving the No Lean Season program allegedly forged the government approval, allegedly in collaboration with an employee of the program’s implementing partner. The government agency allegedly later asked the implementing partner for a bribe to grant approval of the program. Senior leadership at Evidence Action then began an investigation that was largely unsuccessful in its attempts to learn more due to lack of full cooperation from the implementing partner. Evidence Action terminated its relationship with the implementing partner as a result. Evidence Action’s senior leadership also found that some Evidence Action program staff who worked directly with the partner did not fully cooperate with its investigation and had violated internal Evidence Action policy.
Evidence Action decided to shut down No Lean Season because the cost of finding and supporting a new implementing partner was too high, given the disappointing 2017 study results.
Separately, Evidence Action also informed us of a tragic accident involving migrants from households that had received No Lean Season subsidies. We do not believe this contributed to the decision to shut down No Lean Season, but we are sharing it in this post as the investigation into this accident recently concluded.
We will provide additional information on the following in this blog post:
- We outline below the factors contributing to Evidence Action’s decision to shut down its No Lean Season program (More):
- The disappointing 2017 study of the program at scale. (More)
- Evidence Action’s termination of its partnership earlier this year with the organization implementing the program in Bangladesh. After learning of the alleged improprieties (referenced above) in February 2019, senior leadership at Evidence Action began an investigation, conducted by external, independent legal counsel. Given the seriousness of the original allegations, Evidence Action also terminated its contract with the partner. The implementing partner largely refused to cooperate with the investigation, and as a result Evidence Action will not reengage with this partner in the future. (More)
- In the course of its investigation, senior leadership at Evidence Action found evidence of an approximately $400 payment by an Evidence Action program staff member that violated its internal policies, as well as contradictory and potentially misleading statements made by some program staff members to investigators. This finding was not material in the decision to shut down the program, as the implementing partner’s lack of cooperation was already known at that point. (More)
- We summarize the findings of the investigation into the accident involving migrants whose families had received subsidies from the program. (More)
- We do not see any of the above issues as a significant update on Evidence Action as an organization. We expect challenges when working in international development, and think senior leadership at Evidence Action responded responsibly to address these challenges. We do retain open questions about Evidence Action’s selection of implementing partners and its process for hiring and evaluating staff. Finally, we and Evidence Action agree that it should continue to strengthen its financial controls going forward. (More)
- Evidence Action expects No Lean Season to have some funding remaining after the program fully closes out. We expect to ask Evidence Action to redirect the remaining funding it received from GiveWell for No Lean Season to Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative, a GiveWell top charity. We (and Evidence Action) will also take into account donors’ preferences for reallocating this funding; we provide instructions for donors who supported No Lean Season to communicate their preferences to us below. (More)
GiveWell’s plans for 2019
Our top priorities this year support our goals to (a) increase the impact per dollar of the funds we direct and (b) increase our money moved. In 2019, we are focused on:
Review of GiveWell’s work in 2018
2018 was a successful year for GiveWell. We achieved most of our goals and our money moved (donations made to our recommended charities due our research) increased significantly.
Each year, we look back at the goals we set the previous year and reflect on how our progress compared to our expectations.
This post will briefly discuss our key achievements and failures in 2018. We describe in detail our progress on the goals we outlined in 2018 here.
In 2018, we:
- Directed an estimated $65 million in donations to our top charities, not including the contributions of Good Ventures, a large foundation with which we work closely.
- Added senior hires in operations and outreach: a Director of Operations (Whitney Shinkle) and Head of Growth (Ben Bateman). We expect Whitney and Ben to make major contributions to our work in these domains.
- Continued to improve and expand our core research product, completing new intervention reports, deepening our analysis for several key inputs into our cost-effectiveness model, and providing more transparent explanations for how we decided to allocate funds between top charities.
Allocation of discretionary funds from Q4 2018
In the fourth quarter of 2018, donors gave a combined $7.6 million in funding to GiveWell for making grants at our discretion. In this post, we discuss the process we used to decide how to allocate this $7.6 million, as well as an additional $0.8 million designated for grants at GiveWell’s discretion held by the Centre for Effective Altruism and $1.7 million in the EA Fund for Global Health and Development (which is managed by GiveWell Executive Director Elie Hassenfeld), for a total of $10.1 million in funding. We’re so grateful to have a community of supporters that relies on our work and is open to allowing us to allocate funding to the top charity or charities we believe need it most.
We noted in November 2018 that we would use funds received for making grants at our discretion to fill the next highest priority funding gaps among our top charities. At the time, we wrote:
If we had additional funds to allocate now, the most likely recipient would be Malaria Consortium to scale up its work providing seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
Based on our analysis in 2018 as well as updates we have received from our top charities since that time, we have decided to allocate this $10.1 million in funding to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program. The SMC program consists of treating children with a course of preventive antimalarial drugs during the time of year when malaria transmission is greatest.
We continue to recommend that donors giving to GiveWell choose the option on our donation form for “grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding needs. For donors who prefer to give to a specific charity, we note that if we had additional funds to allocate at this time, we would very likely allocate them to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program, which we believe could use additional funding for highly cost-effective work, even after receiving the $10.1 million in funding mentioned above.