The GiveWell Blog

Separating GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project

June 12, 2017 (updated on: July 6, 2017) | by Catherine Hollander

GiveWell has been planning to separate the Open Philanthropy Project from GiveWell for over a year. We’re happy to announce that as of June 1, GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project are separate organizations. GiveWell sold assets and transferred staff to the Open Philanthropy Project LLC, an entity created for the purpose of potentially acquiring the Open Philanthropy Project’s assets and continuing its operations. (Read more about the Open Philanthropy Project LLC here.) The transaction was unanimously approved by GiveWell’s non-conflicted Board members.

We do not expect this change to impact most of GiveWell’s donors. We’re proud to have incubated the Open Philanthropy Project as part of GiveWell and are excited to see what it achieves as an independent organization.

How GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses

June 1, 2017 (updated on: June 1, 2017) | by Catherine Hollander

Our cost-effectiveness analysis plays a critical role in the recommendations we make to donors. For example, as a direct result of our cost-effectiveness calculations, we place a higher priority on filling funding gaps at the charities we recommend that work on deworming programs and distributing malaria nets than we do directing funding to GiveDirectly, a GiveWell top charity that distributes direct cash transfers. We believe that GiveDirectly is the strongest organization we’ve ever seen, but according to our analysis, cash transfers are less cost-effective in terms of impact per dollar donated than deworming treatments and malaria nets.

Accordingly, cost-effectiveness analysis is a major part of GiveWell’s research process. We dedicate a large part of a full-time staff member (Christian Smith)’s capacity to this work and others involved with GiveWell research spend a considerable amount of time engaging with our cost-effectiveness model throughout the year. We consider this analysis a key part of our output and publish our model online so that anyone can check our calculations, enter their own inputs, and see if they agree with our approach and outputs.

This post will provide some basic information about how our cost-effectiveness analyses inform our charity recommendations.

Update on our views on cataract surgery

May 11, 2017 (updated on: June 16, 2017) | by Catherine Hollander

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.

Why GiveWell is partnering with IDinsight

May 4, 2017 (updated on: May 5, 2017) | by Catherine Hollander

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.

March 2017 open thread

March 21, 2017 | by Catherine Hollander

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

Why we’re considering Zusha! as a potential 2017 top charity

February 28, 2017 (updated on: March 1, 2017) | by Catherine Hollander

This post will discuss Zusha!, a 2017 GiveWell top charity contender and GiveWell Incubation Grant recipient. We previously highlighted No Lean Season as a potential 2017 top charity originating from our Incubation Grants work.

GiveWell first learned about Zusha! in 2013 following our publication of a shallow investigation into road safety. In February, Good Ventures made a GiveWell Incubation Grant of $900,000 to support Zusha!. Also in February, two GiveWell staff members visited Zusha! in Nairobi to learn more about its work. We plan to share additional details from their site visit in the future; this post is meant to provide a higher-level overview of Zusha! as a potential GiveWell recommendation.

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