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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Expanding Our Livelihoods Research

We recently announced our expanding focus on livelihoods programs—interventions that help people in poverty earn more and improve their daily lives. We’ve researched and funded livelihoods programs for many years, but we’re taking a significant step forward by hiring a dedicated program officer to develop our long-term livelihoods strategy and explore the area more deeply.

Our new program officer will build on our existing work and lead the search for cost-effective livelihoods opportunities, such as community-driven development projects and programs that create indirect “spillover” benefits. We’re excited to explore more of the impactful programs that we—and our donors—have long cared about.

We dive into this work on a recent podcast episode with GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Senior Program Officer Julie Faller.

Our expanded focus on livelihoods programs touches on a fundamental question that’s central to all of our work. Because our funding is limited, we have to make choices about which programs to support, and those programs don’t all have the same outcomes—some increase people’s income, others prevent illness or death, and still others reduce pain and disability.

This requires us to grapple with a difficult question—how do we compare saving a life to substantially improving one? And because there is no “right” answer, how can we prioritize between programs that achieve different outcomes?

This is where our “moral weights” come in. Put simply, moral weights are the numerical values that we assign to various outcomes. In our cost-effectiveness models, we use moral weights to compare different outcomes and help us understand how much a particular program is likely to help people per dollar donated.

We view our moral weights as necessary tools, not absolute truths. We’ve refined them over the years, particularly the balance between health and income improvements, and we’ll adapt them for livelihoods-focused programs as part of this expansion. You can learn more about that in the recent podcast linked above, and you can explore our moral weights in our new blog post, “Apples, Oranges, and Outcomes.”

Grant Spotlight

Our grantmaking supports programs and research that aim to save and improve lives the most per dollar. Here’s a look at one recent example:

Where: Gombe, Nigeria
What: A malnutrition treatment program providing nutrient-dense therapeutic foods and medical care to severely malnourished children under five
Who: Taimaka
Why it matters: Acute malnutrition weakens children’s immune systems and can increase the risks of developmental delays, illness, and death. GiveWell’s grant will enable Taimaka to treat over 43,000 severely malnourished children who wouldn’t receive treatment otherwise.
Why this grant is promising: With a small additional monitoring grant, Taimaka will conduct surveys on several key program indicators (prevalence of malnutrition, baseline malnutrition treatment coverage, and mortality rates among children under five) that will help reduce uncertainties in our cost-effectiveness estimates. The results could lead to significant grantmaking opportunities in the next five to 10 years.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund and contributions from individual donors

To learn more, check out the newly published grant page.

Partner Roundup

• Watch why Helen Keller Intl calls vitamin A “the micronutrient with a mighty impact.”
• Read about why Malaria Consortium is taking an integrated approach to malaria prevention in Karamoja, Uganda.
• Learn what goes into New Incentives’ projected 2025 cost-per-infant.

Comments or Questions?

We’re always looking for fresh perspectives on our research. If you have comments or questions on our work, we want to hear from you! Reach out to us at info@givewell.org.