Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!

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What We Learned from Red Teaming Our Top Charities

Last year, we conducted “red teaming” to critically examine the case for our four Top Charities. We’re continually working to improve our analyses and grantmaking decisions, so we took a step back to re-evaluate the thousands of hours of research underlying our four Top Charity recommendations. Through this process, we aimed to identify gaps in our research and prioritize issues for future focus.

A team of GiveWell researchers and external experts spent two weeks per Top Charity critiquing our methodologies, assumptions, and conclusions. We asked: What potential problems are most likely to worsen our grantmaking or the credibility of our research? What are the ways we could be overestimating or underestimating the impact of our Top Charities? How could we be wrong?

Overall, we didn’t find any errors that significantly undermined our view that our Top Charities are among the most impactful opportunities that donors can support. However, we did identify four mistakes¹We’ve already written about one of these mistakes on our mistakes page. and 10 key issues that we plan to prioritize as we conduct future grant investigations.

One issue that surfaced is the need to look more closely at the interaction of programs in regions where many programs are being delivered at once. For example, people living in parts of Northern Nigeria might participate in net distributions, seasonal malaria chemoprevention, childhood vaccine campaigns, and distribution of oral rehydration solution to treat diarrhea. If these programs interact or address the same health issues, we could be incorrectly estimating their combined impact, potentially leading to, for example, fewer child deaths averted than we estimate. We’re planning additional research into how these overlapping programs affect each other.

As a result of this work, we’re exploring ways to fine-tune our methodology, such as considering alternative data sources, addressing some potential inconsistencies in our models, and adjusting certain assumptions, like those related to funging and intervention efficacy.

We guess that implementing these changes will lead us to make a few grants that we would not have otherwise made, and to deprioritize some investigations that would have led to grants. In each case, we roughly guess the shift will be about 2% to 12% of our total grantmaking, but because we haven’t fully investigated these issues yet, their impact could end up being more or less significant than we currently anticipate. We don’t expect these changes to affect the total amount of our grantmaking for the year.

We’re implementing immediate changes to our research process, including more frequent engagement with outside experts and additional cross-checks on key data points. We plan to follow up on these issues and report back next year on what we’ve found, including any significant updates to our analyses or recommendations.

Read the full report here.

October Quiz Question + Answer

Last month’s quiz question: From 2011 through 2023, approximately how much funding has GiveWell recommended to support the distribution of insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria?

The answer: Our rough estimate is $410 million!

Out of the 63 responses we received—with answers ranging from $1 million to $1.7 billion—the closest guess was $436 million! Congratulations to our winner, Maya Iyer, who will receive a GiveWell hat as a prize!

Research and Partner Roundup

GiveWell publishes new research pages on a grant to Medicines Development for Global Health to complete the World Health Organization’s pre-qualification process for moxidectin, an intervention report reviewing the evidence for GiveDirectly’s Cash for Poverty Relief program, and more. New Incentives announces new program expansions including malnutrition monitoring and vaccination completion incentives. Malaria Consortium showcases their research at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.