Previously, I outlined the basics of the Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) metric. It takes the approach of converting all health burdens into equivalent “years of healthy life lost”: a year of blindness is counted as .6 lost years, a year of severe malnutrition is counted as .053 lost years, etc. This post discusses two common…
The GiveWell Blog
Month: August 2008
I like it. How do I fund it?
The Community-Led Total Sanitation program looks like a potentially good target of funding. I like the approach: attacking all of the many sources of contamination (see diagram) rather than focusing narrowly on water. It’s been done before, with potentially encouraging results (see page 9). I haven’t seen enough on it to call it a “proven”…
Disability-Adjusted Life Years: Introduction
We’ve had many discussions in the comments about the metric known as Disability-Adjusted Life-Years (DALYs). The DALY essentially converts the burdens imposed by all health issues – from premature death to blindness to injuries – into a single, consistent unit. It is the metric of choice for the Disease Control Priorities Project as well as…
Infant mortality and overpopulation
When looking at programs that mostly target infant mortality, I’ve mostly thought of them as “population-increasing” programs. I’ve sympathized with donors who say that bigger populations might be the last thing poor villages need, and I’ve also assumed that “strict utilitarians” are likely to value such programs more than I do. It’s interesting to see…