Several people have emailed us in the past few days asking about the new evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), published in The Lancet last week. It has received significant attention in the development blogosphere (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here). The evaluation argues that the MVP was responsible for a substantial drop…
The GiveWell Blog
All Millennium Villages Posts
Celebrated charities that we don’t recommend
Note added April 2024: As we explain on our mistakes page, the tone of this blog post, which was written much earlier in our organizational history, fails to convey our uncertainty about the impact of these programs. It also doesn’t indicate that our research involves forming best guesses based on limited information, and that we…
Agriculture charity evaluation: Incomes boosted are not the same as lives changed
What’s wrong with this “evidence of impact” for high-profile charities? The Millennium Villages project‘s main evidence of impact so far appears to be increasing crop yields by a factor of 4-15x in 3 villages. (H/T to the recent coverage of Millennium Villages on Aid Watch) A KickStart evaluation (available on our website (DOC)) reports that…