Below is the email I received from Kelli M. Donley, Program Director at Esperanca, in response to the questions I asked in Part I and Part II of this series: Dear Elie, Hi there! I am going to try to answer your questions to the best of my knowledge. I hope this helps: These questions…
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Where can you donate to fight malnutrition? (part II)
In Part I, I listed some questions about malnutrition that I think you’d have to answer to have any sense of what you’re accomplishing with your donation, and how it compares to your other options. I then went on a search – similar to what we did part-time before we started GiveWell – to see…
Where can you donate to fight malnutrition? (part I)
In this post, I’m going to take a fresh look at malnutrition, a cause that interests me a lot. I have two goals in mind here: Think through the issue, and what I’d need to know to decide where to donate. This is particularly relevant since there’s a good chance we’ll be studying malnutrition in…
Microloans vs. payday loans
Phil Cubeta’s recent post about payday loans got me thinking about our choice to grant a microfinance organization in our Global Poverty cause. We decided to grant Opportunity International for two reasons: The belief that there is likely a significant shortage of access to credit in the developing world. The very fact that someone repays…
Rethinking bednets
We granted Population Services International in our Saving Lives in Africa cause, focusing largely on their condom and bednet distribution and promotion programs. Soon after we cut the check, I got into a conversation with someone who questioned whether bednets are effective at all. He pointed me to a paper, “Combating malaria morbidity and mortality…
Evaluating charter schools, continued
We appreciate the feedback we got on our last blog post. This post will address the substantive issues raised by commenters. Evaluation and test scores We aren’t seeking to settle the question of how to measure success in education. That would be biting off far more than we can chew. Instead, we have largely invited…