The GiveWell Blog

Update on our views on cataract surgery

We’re often asked why GiveWell doesn’t recommend any organizations that focus on providing surgeries. This post will describe:

  • Work we did previously to try to find surgery charities to recommend. In brief, our inability to identify organizations with room for more funding and high-quality monitoring data prevented us from recommending surgery charities in general.
  • Our current (rough, preliminary) view that cataract surgery’s cost-effectiveness may be competitive with that of our priority programs, and some of the major open questions we have about our estimate.
  • Organizations implementing cataract surgery programs that we’ve spoken with. They run a variety of programs, and our impression is that they do not yet have the type of high-quality monitoring information we’re interested in.
  • Our plans to move forward with IDinsight to improve our understanding of cataract surgery as an intervention.

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Why GiveWell is partnering with IDinsight

This post will highlight GiveWell’s work with IDinsight, part of our Incubation Grants program to help grow the pipeline of potential future top charities and improve the quality of GiveWell’s recommendations. We previously highlighted the work of No Lean Season and Zusha!, Incubation Grant recipients and potential 2017 GiveWell top charities. Unlike these organizations, we don’t expect IDinsight to itself become a top charity. Instead, we hope it will help GiveWell support the development of more top charities and increase our understanding of the organizations we recommend.

IDinsight is an international NGO that aims to help its clients develop and use rigorous evidence to improve social impact. GiveWell is partnering with IDinsight to support organizations’ development of monitoring and evaluation information of the type we’re interested in. This is the first partnership of this kind for GiveWell.

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