The GiveWell Blog

Giving cash versus giving bednets

We recently published a new review of GiveDirectly, a “standout” charity that gives cash directly to poor people in Kenya. As we were going through the process of discussing and vetting the new review, I found myself wondering how I would defend my preference to donate to distribute insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) against a serious advocate…

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Update on Against Malaria Foundation’s costs

New cost estimates for AMF’s 2012 distributions In a blog post in February, we noted that we had missed some costs in our estimates that were incurred by AMF’s distribution partner, Concern Universal. We undertook an assessment of these costs through discussion with Concern Universal. In the course of our assessment, we re-visited our estimate…

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Millennium Villages Project

Several people have emailed us in the past few days asking about the new evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), published in The Lancet last week. It has received significant attention in the development blogosphere (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). The evaluation argues that the MVP was responsible for a substantial drop…

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GiveWell Labs update and priority causes

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Over the past few months, the main focus of GiveWell Labs has been strategic cause selection. Before diving into a particular cause, we want to make sure we’ve done a reasonable amount of work looking at all our options and picking…

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What large-scale philanthropy focuses on today

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] We think there are two key questions for someone trying to do strategic cause selection: (1) What is the history of philanthropy – what’s worked and what hasn’t? (2) What is the current state of philanthropy – what are philanthropists focused…

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Strategic cause selection

[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] Our picture of how most major foundations work is as follows: First, broad program areas or “causes” – such as “U.S. education” and “environment” – are chosen. This step is almost entirely “from the heart” – no systematic review is conducted,…

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