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 does GiveWell’s cross-cutting research team do?
Each year, GiveWell recommends hundreds of millions of dollars in grants aimed at saving and improving lives around the world. Our cross-cutting research team supports that effort by rigorously testing our conclusions, tackling thorny research questions, and identifying ways to make our research clearer and more transparent.
We recently shared an update on the “red teaming” exercise led by our cross-cutting team that pressure tested the research and assumptions behind our Top Charity recommendations. Here are a few other recent cross-cutting projects:
- A grant to researchers at the Center for Global Development to answer the question: “If the opportunities GiveWell funds are highly effective and relatively low cost, why aren’t they already funded by other groups focused on saving lives?”
- A report aiming to understand whether we are overestimating the cost-effectiveness of our Top Charities by double-counting lives saved each year.
- A re-evaluation of unconditional cash transfers, which led us to update our cost-effectiveness estimate of GiveDirectly’s flagship cash program—we now estimate the program to be 3 to 4 times more cost-effective than we’d previously thought.
Looking ahead, we have several important projects on our agenda:
- “Lookbacks” to assess whether grants we made had the impact we expected, including:
- Analysis of approximately $190 million in grants for water chlorination, vitamin A supplementation, and conditional cash transfers for vaccination.
- Analysis of approximately $120 million in technical assistance grants, which have supported programs such as iron and folic acid supplementation and syphilis screening and treatment.
- Examination of long-standing questions in our research, including:
- How should we deal with ongoing questions about the quality of disease and mortality burden data underlying our cost-effectiveness models?
- How concerned should we be about insecticide-treated nets being used for fishing?
- How should we compare the value of providing contraception to the value of increasing incomes or averting deaths when we consider funding family planning programs?
For more on the cross-cutting team’s priorities, check out this blog post. If you have ideas about questions we should be asking, things we could be wrong about, or assumptions we should pressure test, we’d love to hear from you—email us at info@givewell.org.
Research and Partner Roundup
GiveWell publishes new research pages on a grant to New Incentives to expand its conditional cash transfer program; a grant to Malaria Consortium to support its seasonal malaria chemoprevention program in Karamoja, Uganda; and more. Malaria Consortium publishes a news release in response to the World Health Organization’s 2024 World Malaria Report. Against Malaria Foundation surpasses $700 million in total donations.