There’s been a minor flurry of recent blog posts about randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in international aid, including William Easterly’s take and responses by Chris Blattman and GiveWell Board member Tim Ogden. A central theme has been the difficulty of generalizing from one experiment to whether something “works in general.” There seems to be a…
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Can donors fund “sustainable” projects?
It’s one thing to pay for children’s immunizations. It would be quite another to pay for a project that increased immunization rates over the long term, without continued donor support (either thanks to improvement in private-sector or government operations). Aiming for the latter – or more broadly, aiming to use donations as “startup funds” for…
2008-2009 international aid recommendations
Our 2008-2009 recommendations for international aid are now available. Report homepage Recommended and top-rated charities Highlights: We believe that health is the best area for an individual donor looking to accomplish concrete good. Many programs have strong and proven track records of success in international aid. This is largely not true of other areas. More…
Donating to Gates – against its will
With all the people and organizations out there who would like more money, there’s something remarkable about the fact that the Gates Foundation is specifically asking people NOT to give to it (PDF) – and still couldn’t keep away over $10 million in donations in 2008. Why the Gates Foundation doesn’t want your money First…
The challenge of local ownership
One of the consistent refrains we’ve seen in aid literature is the importance of local participation/enthusiasm/ownership for aid projects. Many programs have been criticized for being too “top-down” (i.e., imposing outsiders’ designs on local communities), with the implication that more “bottom-up” programs (i.e., getting local people to participate in the design of execution of programs)…
November conference sponsored by Social Solutions
I’ll be speaking on a panel, “Improving How we Give,” at this November conference. Should be interesting.