We recently published a new review of GiveDirectly, a “standout” charity that gives cash directly to poor people in Kenya. As we were going through the process of discussing and vetting the new review, I found myself wondering how I would defend my preference to donate to distribute insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs) against a serious advocate…
The GiveWell Blog
All Against Malaria Foundation Posts
Update on Against Malaria Foundation’s costs
New cost estimates for AMF’s 2012 distributions In a blog post in February, we noted that we had missed some costs in our estimates that were incurred by AMF’s distribution partner, Concern Universal. We undertook an assessment of these costs through discussion with Concern Universal. In the course of our assessment, we re-visited our estimate…
Update on the Against Malaria Foundation: Our current #1-ranked charity
Highlights from our update of AMF follow. For those who want more information, please see our full AMF update. Background Historically, AMF had distributed bednets in the following way: on-the-ground organizations applied to AMF for nets; after AMF reviewed and approved proposals, it would ship nets to the charity; finally, AMF would check in to…
Update: Against Malaria Foundation’s costs
We learned last week that we underestimated the total cost of the Against Malaria Foundation’s insecticide-treated net distribution. A nonprofit interested in reducing costs for its own model read our AMF review and contacted AMF and Concern Universal (AMF’s distribution partner in Malawi). The nonprofit representative noticed that Concern’s costs seemed lower than he expected,…
Dissenting opinions on our top charities
We feel very good about recommending that donors give to our top charities, and they’re where all GiveWell staff are – happily and confidently – giving our personal donations this year. That said, we’re skeptical by nature, and internally, we keep thinking about and discussing the ways in which our top charities might not work…
Deciding between two outstanding charities
We’ve recently published our updated charity recommendations, featuring two top charities (Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative) that score well on all of our criteria. In this post, we discuss how we decided which of these two charities to rank #1 and which to rank #2. Both charities are executing health programs that deliver…