Now that giving season has ended, we will be shifting our priorities and slowing down the pace of blog posts. Here’s a quick overview of the highlights from our last few months:

• You Can Save A Life: GiveWell in a nutshell. Why give to a charity with a great story and nebulous impact, when by giving to a top charity you can actually save a life?
• Frank discussions of our top two charities, VillageReach and Stop Tuberculosis Partnership.
• Celebrated charities we don’t recommend: a roundup of recent critiques of non-recommended charities.
• Our take on microfinance:
  • 6 myths about microfinance, debunked.
  • “High repayment rates” don’t mean what you think.
  • Summary of our full 17-post series.
• Our take on other approaches to “economic empowerment”:
  • Agricultural training/technology/knowledge sharing
    
  • Gifts of livestock (e.g., Heifer International)
    
  • Social enterprise investment (e.g., Acumen Fund)
• 5-post series on “room for more funding”, the essential question about charities that no one seems to ask.
• Poor in the U.S. = rich: why U.S. poverty and overseas poverty are no comparison. (Also see our post on different definitions of “hunger”.)
• Some thoughts on GiveWell’s general approach:
  • We focus on gifts that help people, not gifts that feel good. We think the latter currently gets too much attention.
  • We don’t focus on “how much a charity spends on overhead.” A broad consensus is emerging that this is the worst way to pick a charity.
    
  • We believe that the burden of proof is on the charities to show that they’re having an impact. Our “default assumption” about a charity is that it isn’t living up to its story, and we think great charities are the exception rather than the rule.

  • As such, we are willing to give a charity a negative rating based on a failure to share meaningful information, even if we don’t have hard proof that it’s failing. This is probably the single most controversial aspect of our process, and we defend it at length in this post.