The GiveWell Blog

Nothing wrong with selfish giving – just don’t call it philanthropy

Tactical Philanthropy has an interesting discussion of “non-optimized giving”: New Philanthropy Capital CEO Martin Brookes “confesses” to “wasting charitable funds” on a cause he doesn’t believe is the best, and Sean responds that “Under your logic, we should all feel guilty about all of our giving that does not go to the single best charity…

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Pictures/audio/notes from my visits to Small Enterprise Foundation (South Africa) and VillageReach (Mozambique)

Between 2/10 and 2/23, I visited two of our recommended charities: The Small Enterprise Foundation (our top-rated microfinance organization and one of two winners of our recent Economic Empowerment Grant – note that our review is not yet available but has been drafted and will be published shortly) and VillageReach (our current top-rated charity overall)….

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Blog design

We’ve changed the design of our blog to incorporate it more fully within the main GiveWell site. If you read this blog through RSS you shouldn’t notice any changes. Please let us know if you have any problems.

GiveWell’s annual self-evaluation and plan: Summary

We have been posting our annual self-evaluation and plan to the blog. Here’s a summary: Basic outline and questions we asked Self-Evaluation: GiveWell as a donor resource Self-Evaluation: GiveWell as a project Plan: top-level priorities Plan: specifics of research High-level summary in Excel format The documents we’ve referred to in the above posts are linked…

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GiveWell’s plan: Specifics of research

This is the final post (of four) we’re planning to make focused on our self-evaluation and future plans. The first post is here; the second is here; and, the third is here. In a previous post, we laid out our reasons for focusing on the broad category of “research” over the next year. This includes…

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