The GiveWell Blog

Our updated top charities for giving season 2015

We have refreshed our top charity rankings and recommendations. Our set of top charities and standouts is the same as last year’s, but we have introduced rankings and changed our recommended funding allocation, due to a variety of updates – particularly to our top charities’ room for more funding. In particular, we are recommending that…

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Good Ventures’ $25 million grant to GiveDirectly

Good Ventures has granted $25 million to GiveDirectly for the support of GiveDirectly’s general operations. While the grant is unrestricted, we expect that GiveDirectly will most likely use this grant as follows: ~$6-9 million: to hire a marketing team to raise significantly more funding than GiveDirectly has raised in the past. ~$16-19 million: to provide…

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Top charities’ room for more funding

In December, we published targets for how much money we hoped to move to each of our top four charities, with the expectation of revisiting these targets mid-year: In past years, we’ve worked on an annual cycle, refreshing our recommendations each December. This year, because we anticipate closing (or nearly closing) the funding gaps of…

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Our updated top charities

Our top charities are (in alphabetical order): Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) Deworm the World Initiative (DtWI), led by Evidence Action GiveDirectly Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) We have recommended all four of these charities in the past. We have also included four additional organizations on our top charities page as standout charities. They are (in alphabetical…

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Update on GiveDirectly

Three members of GiveDirectly‘s board of directors (Paul Niehaus, Michael Faye, and Chris Hughes) are planning to start a for-profit technology company, Segovia, aimed at improving the efficiency of cash transfer distributions in the developing world. Segovia plans to sell software to developing-country governments for use in implementing their cash transfer programs. This development was…

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A journalist visits GiveDirectly villages in Kenya

In February, Jacob Kushner, a journalist living in Kenya, contacted us. We have long been interested in seeing more substantive coverage of philanthropy, so we were excited to talk to him. As a pilot project, Mr. Kushner decided to visit villages in which GiveDirectly had distributed some of its earliest cash transfers. We spoke with…

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