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…
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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…
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…
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…
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…
The case for cash
Our choice to name GiveDirectly as our #2 charity has drawn some surprise and criticism. GiveDirectly seeks to deliver 90c directly into the hands of the very poor (no strings attached) for every $1 of total organizational expenses. There are many people who consider this intervention “unproven” (since there is not research linking cash transfers…