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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Rethinking SCI’s evidence of impact

We’ve recently encountered some new (to us) information about studies we have relied on in our evaluation of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), which is one of our top charities (and will remain one after our upcoming refresh). We won’t be able to fully investigate all the implications of this information by the end of giving…

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Why I didn’t give to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative last year

Before publishing this post, I sent a draft to Alan Fenwick, Director of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative who asked colleagues of his to comment. We asked each person for their permission to post their comments, and we’ve posted those for which we received permission here: Dr. Dan Colley’s comments (PDF). Dr. Colley is the Director…

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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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Evidence of impact for long-term benefits

We’ve recently published our updated review on the evidence on cash transfers. It elaborates on a claim we’ve made previously – that there is evidence for long-term benefits from cash transfers at high average rates of return. Some people have expressed skepticism of this evidence, pointing to several limitations: there are not many studies, some…

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