Good Ventures has announced: Grants to our top charities: $2 million to GiveDirectly, $1.5 million to Deworm the World Initiative, $750,000 to Schistosomiasis Control Initiative. A match, up to $5 million total and $100,000 per donor, on donations made to GiveDirectly from today through January 31, 2014. Good Ventures spells out its reasoning here. We…
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Rigorous study of GiveDirectly’s cash transfers
Carrying out a highly rigorous study is difficult, expensive, and can take a long time. It’s very rare to see a charity that has carried out a highly rigorous study of its own work – one that can isolate the impact of its program from all the other factors affecting its clients. As such, we…
GiveWell’s top charities for giving season 2013
Our top charities for this giving season are GiveDirectly, Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), and the Deworm the World Initiative (DtWI) (led by Evidence Action). The first two have been recommended previously. The third is a new addition, and we encourage readers to see our full review. We’ve had extensive internal discussions about how to rank…
Rethinking SCI’s evidence of impact
We’ve recently encountered some new (to us) information about studies we have relied on in our evaluation of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), which is one of our top charities (and will remain one after our upcoming refresh). We won’t be able to fully investigate all the implications of this information by the end of giving…
Change in Against Malaria Foundation recommendation status (room-for-more-funding-related)
Note: AMF has reviewed a draft of this post. We believe AMF’s willingness to let individual donors follow along with it – both the successes and the struggles – is highly unusual in the charity world, and an extremely important and positive quality. Since naming the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) as our #1 charity in…
How to approach policy-oriented philanthropy
[Added August 27, 2014: GiveWell Labs is now known as the Open Philanthropy Project.] As noted previously, we’ve been working on improving our broad understanding of the role that philanthropy can play in influencing and informing policy. One of my goals has been to hear different perspectives on how one should (for maximum effectiveness) approach…