The GiveWell Blog

Update on Open Philanthropy Project

Our last major public updates on the Open Philanthropy Project were our May and June posts on global catastrophic risks and U.S. policy. This post summarizes our progress since then and where we currently stand on our goal of committing to causes. Summary of currently ongoing activities Deep dives on priority causes for U.S. policy….

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Update on SCI’s evidence of impact

Note: Consistent with our usual practices, SCI reviewed a draft of this post prior to publication, but the final product is ours. We wrote last year about reevaluating studies we relied on in our evaluation of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), which is one of our top charities. We noted at the time that we were planning to…

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Reminder: Annual rankings refresh

This is just a reminder to donors considering supporting our top charities in the next month. As we do every year, we’re planning to refresh our list of top charities before December 1st. (More on why our website can get out of sync with our internal views around this time of year.)

Investigating the Ebola response

Should you donate to efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in west Africa? With hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from other donors, will your donation make a difference? How does this compare to giving to GiveWell’s top charities? These are difficult questions. It’s always hard to estimate how much good a donation does;…

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Our ongoing review of Living Goods

Living Goods runs a network of Community Health Promoters (CHPs) who sell health and household goods door-to-door in their communities in Uganda and Kenya. CHPs also provide basic health counseling. Living Goods also provides consulting and funding to other organizations to run similar networks in other locations. We have been considering Living Goods for a…

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Expert philanthropy vs. broad philanthropy

It seems to me that the most common model in philanthropy – seen at nearly every major staffed foundation – is to have staff who specialize in a particular cause (for example, specializing in criminal justice policy). Often, such staff have a very strong background in the cause before they come to the foundation, and they generally…

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