The GiveWell Blog

Deciding between two outstanding charities

We’ve recently published our updated charity recommendations, featuring two top charities (Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative) that score well on all of our criteria. In this post, we discuss how we decided which of these two charities to rank #1 and which to rank #2. Both charities are executing health programs that deliver…

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Top charities for holiday season 2011: Against Malaria Foundation and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative

GiveWell has published our annual update on how to accomplish as much good as possible with your donations. Our top two charities – out of hundreds we’ve examined – are (1) the Against Malaria Foundation, which fights malaria using insecticide-treated bednets, and (2) the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative, which treats children for intestinal worms. Our update…

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GiveWell is aiming to have a new #1 charity by December

Our current top-rated charity is VillageReach. In 2010, we directed over $1.1 million to it, which met its short-term funding needs (i.e., its needs for the next year or so). VillageReach still has longer-term needs, and in the absence of other giving opportunities that we consider comparable, we’ve continued to feature it as #1 on…

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What it takes to evaluate impact

When someone asks me what makes GiveWell different from other third-party charity evaluators, I often answer by listing all the things we’ve done in order to investigate our current top-rated charity, VillageReach. We’ve done extensive background research on international aid and argued for key takeaways such as the overall promise of international aid for donors,…

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Your dollars at work: Update on top-rated charity VillageReach

VillageReach is the first (hopefully not the last) charity for which (a) GiveWell has raised enough money to make a qualitative difference in VillageReach’s activities; (b) GiveWell has a clear enough picture of the room for more funding situation to be able to say with some confidence what that difference is. We intend on providing…

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After “extraordinary and unorthodox” comes the valley of death

An anonymous donor got some buzz a few weeks ago with its call on Innocentive for “extraordinary and unorthodox” philanthropic opportunities. It seeks a project that “holds the potential for a transformational impact,” “is unlikely to attract funding elsewhere due to its risky, unorthodox, and/or neglected profile,” and will be able to “attract additional capital…

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