Over the past few months, we’ve been continuing our search for outstanding microfinance organizations (in addition to the one we’ve already identified). Below are the results. Overview of our process and key questions In brief, our take on microfinance is that offering credit and other financial services is likely an effective way to improve people’s…
The GiveWell Blog
Year: 2010
Responses to blog comments
We’ve had lots of thoughtful comments on the blog lately, and we haven’t had a chance to respond because we’ve been in the process of moving to Mumbai. So I wanted to give a heads up that I’ve now had a chance to respond as appropriate to all comments; see “Recent comments” on the left…
Our advice re: donations for Pakistan flood
We’ve been researching the cause of disaster relief, with the goal of doing a better job than we have in the past serving the donors who come to us for help in the wake of a crisis. At this point our research is still in progress, but we can offer some basic advice to donors…
High-quality study of Head Start early childhood care program
Early this year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released by far the most high-quality study to date of the Head Start childhood care program. I’ve had a chance to review this study, and I feel the results are very interesting. The study’s quality is outstanding, in terms of design and analysis (as…
Needed from major funders: More great organizations
In the wake of the recent Giving Pledges, we’ve been discussing what advice we’d give a major philanthropist (aside from our usual plea to conduct evaluations and share them publicly). For the most part, our recommendations and criteria are aimed at individual donors, not major philanthropists. We stress the value of given to proven, cost-effective,…
Philanthropy vouchers
We focus on finding charities that are doing demonstrably good work already, rather than on proposals for new sorts of projects. This post is an exception: we’ve been tossing around an idea for “philanthropy vouchers” that we think could be worth trying in a broad variety of contexts, and we’re interested in others’ thoughts. The…