At the moment, we don’t see highly time-sensitive giving opportunities that we are likely to recommend around responding to the Ebola outbreak in west Africa. We still plan to put out a detailed blog post describing what we’ve done to investigate the situation and what we think the best options for donors are, but we…
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Investigating the Ebola response
Should you donate to efforts to contain the Ebola outbreak in west Africa? With hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from other donors, will your donation make a difference? How does this compare to giving to GiveWell’s top charities? These are difficult questions. It’s always hard to estimate how much good a donation does;…
Thoughts on the end of Hewlett’s Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative
Note: we sent a pre-publication draft of this post to multiple people who had been involved in the Hewlett program discussed here. A response from the Hewlett Foundation is available in the comments of this post; a response from Jacob Harold is available on the GuideStar blog. Last April, the Chronicle of Philanthropy covered the…
Our ongoing review of ICCIDD
The International Council for the Control of Iodine Deficiency Disorders Global Network (ICCIDD) advocates for and assists programs that fortify salt with iodine. Our preliminary work (writeup forthcoming) implies that even moderate iodine deficiency can lead to impaired cognitive development. ICCIDD tracks iodine deficiency around the world and encourages countries with iodine deficient populations to…
Sequence thinking vs. cluster thinking
Note: this is an unusually long and abstract post whose primary purpose is to help a particular subset of our audience understand our style of reasoning. It does not contain substantive updates on our research and recommendations. GiveWell – both our traditional work and GiveWell Labs – is fundamentally about maximization: doing as much good as…
David Roodman’s draft writeup on the mortality-fertility connection
We’re sometimes asked whether life-saving interventions (such as insecticide-treated net distribution) risk leading to overpopulation. A common response is that (as argued by Hans Rosling of Gapminder and the most recent Gates Foundation annual letter, among others) the reverse dynamic holds: population growth tends to slow as child mortality declines, possibly because parents feel less…