For our first round of grantmaking, we chose to investigate five broad causes, two in the developing world (saving lives and fighting poverty) and three in the developed world (early childhood care; K-12 education; employment assistance). This decision – doing five causes, instead of narrowing our scope from the outset – had serious costs. Even…
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Rethinking bednets
We granted Population Services International in our Saving Lives in Africa cause, focusing largely on their condom and bednet distribution and promotion programs. Soon after we cut the check, I got into a conversation with someone who questioned whether bednets are effective at all. He pointed me to a paper, “Combating malaria morbidity and mortality…
Rigorous research on aid
Measuring the effect of aid on people’s lives can be difficult, and may never be perfect – but we believe that it can be done, and has been done, both rigorously and practically. Examples can be found on three sites devoted to conducting and/or promoting rigorous evaluation of social programs: Poverty Action Lab, Innovators for…
Evaluating charter schools, continued
We appreciate the feedback we got on our last blog post. This post will address the substantive issues raised by commenters. Evaluation and test scores We aren’t seeking to settle the question of how to measure success in education. That would be biting off far more than we can chew. Instead, we have largely invited…
Evaluating charter schools
Note: a positive effect of recent events was a set of substantive concerns about our model raised by non-profit insiders and others. We put all our reasoning and assumptions on our website precisely because we value critiques that will help us improve, and we look forward to responding to and discussing all concerns shortly. This…
Updated: Statement from the GiveWell Board of Directors
On Monday, Elie Hassenfeld communicated to the board that he posted a comment on December 31, 2007 related to GiveWell that was not under his own name. The comment was made under the name Talia and is linked here. In response to the actions by Mr. Hassenfeld which were inconsistent with GiveWell’s core values of…