The GiveWell Blog

Our recent visit to Burkina Faso

GiveWell staff recently visited Burkina Faso to meet with staff of one of our top charities, Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program, and observe its work. Through its SMC program, Malaria Consortium distributes preventative anti-malarial medication at a time of year when it is needed most.

As I write below, GiveWell donors have directed more than $37 million to Malaria Consortium over the last 18 months at our recommendation. We expect that this will provide preventative treatments to 4.8 million children and avert over 16,000 deaths. We’re so appreciative of the support of our community in enabling this tremendous impact.

We originally sent a version of the following message to supporters of Malaria Consortium’s SMC program in late August. We received positive feedback on this message and decided to share it more broadly on our blog. We plan to publish more information about the 2019 Burkina Faso site visit in the future.

Hello from Burkina Faso!

I’m here on a site visit of Malaria Consortium, one of our recommended charities, to see its malaria prevention program in action.

This visit helped me relate more deeply to the program by getting to know some of the people who run it and some of the people who benefit from it. I wanted to share my experience with you.

Read More

Reflections on a site visit in Myanmar (Burma)

This is a cross-post from Good Ventures’ blog Give & Learn. It was co-authored by Cari Tuna, Good Ventures Co-Founder, and Natalie Crispin, GiveWell Research Analyst. We recently traveled to Myanmar to visit a project Good Ventures is supporting to help prevent the spread of drug-resistant malaria. This post shares some observations from the trip…

Read More

Evaluating local charities in India

A donor of ours earmarked $10,000 for regranting to a local charity in India, and in deciding how to give this away (and for general learning) we conducted 20+ site visits to small NGOs during our travels. In a sense, this was a chance for us to try out a more traditional method of giving:…

Read More

Natalie’s general notes from living in India

Previous posts shared Holden’s and Elie’s general thoughts from last year’s several-month staff trip to India. This post shares my thoughts; the next will discuss our thought process in deciding which local charity to support. General notes on site visits I was quite surprised (pleasantly so) by how receptive the charity directors we contacted in…

Read More

Elie’s general notes from living in India

A previous post shared Holden’s general thoughts from last year’s several-month staff trip to India. This post shares my thoughts; the next will share Natalie’s. Site visits are short and it’s impossible get a full picture of an organization, its work, and its likely impact. But, little things about how programs look on the ground…

Read More

Holden’s general notes from living in India

Last year, the staff of GiveWell moved to Mumbai for several months. We did this largely for personal reasons (our staff is small enough that we were able to coordinate it, and we all thought it would be interesting) but also took advantage of our time there to visit 20 nonprofits (some of them more…

Read More