The GiveWell Blog

Good Ventures matching gift to GiveDirectly and grants to top charities

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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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…

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Responses to objections on cash transfers

Since our recommendation of GiveDirectly last year, we’ve seen a fair amount of pushback and skepticism. We’ve recently been speaking with donors who have supported our other top charities – and not GiveDirectly – to get a better sense of what their reservations are. This post lays out what we see as the most common…

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Guest post from David Barry about deworming cost-effectiveness

This is a guest post by David Barry, a GiveWell supporter. He emailed us at the end of December to point out some mistakes and issues in our cost-effectiveness calculations for deworming, and we asked him to write up his thoughts to share here. We made minor wording and organizational suggestions but have otherwise published…

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Cash transfers vs. microloans

We’ve written that people in the developing world can get very high returns – in excess of 20% annually (and sometimes much more) – on cash transfers. We’ve previously argued that this is both plausible and empirically supported. However, it raises the question: “If people in the developing world can get such good returns on…

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