The GiveWell Blog

The most important problem may not be the best charitable cause

(updated on: ) | by Holden

I recently ran across a charity called Project AK-47 that declares:

Over 100,000 kids are carrying machine guns in the armies of Southeast Asia. Instead of walking to school, they march to war. Instead of playing, they train to kill. If we don’t intervene, most of these children will be soldiers for at least 7 more years…assuming they survive.

We have been rescuing as many of these child soldiers as possible. But right now, without more help, we have to turn many child soldiers away. Your $7 can make the difference between life and death for a child soldier.

A kid or a killer…you decide.

It’s a powerful emotional appeal, and if I could make the purchase they advertise, I would (many times over). There’s just one problem: after carefully examining the entire website, I cannot determine what this organization does.

It mentions paying for “7 days of food,” “7 days of quality education,” “play clothes to replace a child’s army uniform,” and “supplies for a child’s initial urgent medical care and hygiene” … but what is the plan to prevent them from becoming soldiers? Is this nonprofit hiring mercenaries to conduct armed rescues? Coming into peaceful communities and hoping that its help will discourage children from turning to the military? Or something else? And whatever it is, is it doable and does it work? I couldn’t find the answer.

It’s an extreme example of a style of argument common to nonprofits: point to a problem so large and severe (and the world has many such problems) that donors immediately focus on that problem – feeling compelled to give to the organization working on addressing it – without giving equal attention to the proposed solution, how much it costs, and how likely it is to work. Another example is the massive support for organizations such as the Save Darfur movement, despite serious questions about what exactly Save Darfur is trying to do (questions that I doubt most of its supporters have looked into).

Many of the donors we hear from are passionately committed to fighting global warming because it’s the “most pressing problem,” or to a particular disease because it affected them personally – even while freely admitting that they know nothing about the most promising potential solutions. I ask these donors to consider the experience related by William Easterly:

I am among the many who have tried hard to find the answer to the question of what the end of poverty requires of foreign aid. I realized only belatedly that I was asking the question backward … the right way around [is]: What can foreign aid do for poor people? (White Man’s Burden pg 11)

As a single human being, your powers are limited. As a donor, you’re even more limited – you’re not giving your talent or your creativity, just your money. This creates a fundamentally different challenge from identifying the problem you care most about, and can lead to a completely different answer.

In my case: I would rather close the achievement gap than fight developing-world disease, but my giving goes to the latter because it’s a problem that I can do much more to address.

The truth is that you may not be able to do anything to help address the root causes of poverty or cure cancer or solve the global energy crisis.* But you probably can save a life, and insisting on giving to the “biggest problem” could be passing up that chance.

*I haven’t looked into the latter two, and it’s possible that they are more tractable. If you know something about their tractability, I encourage you to share it.

Volunteer tutoring program

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Via Joanne Jacobs: a large randomized controlled trial found statistically effects of a volunteer tutoring program on reading skills.

The effect size (.1-.16 standard deviations on 3 measures; insignificant on one other – see pg 13 of the full study) is in the same ballpark as the effect observed in a recent study of vouchers in D.C. (which we discussed here) – yet this was a 24-week intervention as opposed to a 3-year effect from switching schools. (Though which one “costs” more is debatable, since the voucher program simply reallocated public funds whereas this one required time and expense outside the standard school system.)

Note that this program reached much younger children (grades 1-3 – page 5) and focused on those with the worst performance – an approach that seems sensible based on how early the achievement gap appears. It also focused exclusively on reading, an approach that appeals to me intuitively because – speaking purely from intuition – reading seems like a more universally important skill than other skills taught in school.

Though the effect size isn’t huge, it’s an encouraging result.

Positive but underwhelming voucher study

(updated on: ) | by Holden

The third-year evaluation of a federally funded school voucher program in D.C. has recently been released (H/T Joanne Jacobs).

We’ve written before that past voucher studies have shown extremely underwhelming (if any) effects, and at first glance this report would seem to be a change in the pattern: “The evaluation found that the OSP improved reading, but not math, achievement overall and for 5 of 10 subgroups of students examined.” But on slightly closer examination, I’m not sure how much there is to be excited about here. A few observations (page numbers refer to the full study, available here):

  • The study found a statistically significant impact on reading performance after year 3 – but no impact on math performance, and no impact on either after years 1 or 2 (xvii).
  • The impact appears largely to have been confined to students who were less disadvantaged to begin with (see page 36). Students coming from “schools in need of improvement” (i.e., the weakest schools) saw no statistically significant improvement.
  • Even with all of these caveats aside, the impact was small, estimated at about .15 standard deviations after 3 years for students who used (not just received) the scholarship. For context, a .15 standard-deviation improvement for a student initially scoring in the 25th percentile would take him/her to the 30th percentile.
  • It strikes me as odd that the estimated effect of using vouchers was so close to the estimated effect of receiving vouchers (.15 vs. .13 standard deviations -see page 36), even though only 41% of recipients consistently used the scholarships and 25% did not use them at all (see page xxiii). The study does not explicitly address the performance of the students who received scholarships but did not use them – if a similar effect showed up there, I’d worry that randomization wasn’t carried out as intended.

The study is more encouraging than others I’ve seen about the effects of vouchers, but the picture it gives is still very far from the idea that vouchers (alone) can make a significant dent in the achievement gap.

Clarifying the role of different partners

(updated on: ) | by Elie

One major question we’ve struggled to answer is: how do the different NGOs, local governments, and international global health partnerships work together to implement a given program?

For example, take mass drug administration of ivermectin to reduce onchocerciasis, one of our favorite programs. In Uganda, the African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control (APOC) works out of the World Health Organization (WHO). The Ugandan Ministry of Health is also involved. So are two nonprofits, The Carter Center and SightSavers International. What role does each play?

Steven Kasolo, the program officer responsible for SightSavers’ onchocerciasis program in Uganda, kindly agreed to speak with us on Tuesday morning. A summary (paraphrased highlights, not verbatim) follows. To us the key points to note are that:

  • Program implementation is ultimately being done exclusively by (district-level) government officials.
  • APOC, The Carter Center, and Sight Savers International provide funding and in some cases help with reporting, but do not have significant staff on the ground.
  • Funds flow from APOC and the nonprofits to the district-level government officials. The funds are kept in separate accounts and come with separate reporting requirements, but otherwise are largely fungible (according to Steven). From a donor perspective, it doesn’t seem to matter much which of the three donation-accepting organizations (APOC, SightSavers, The Carter Center) the funds flow through, given that they’re funding this project.

Elie: What role does SSI [Sight Savers International] play in Uganda’s onchocerciasis program?

Steven: SSI has two roles. One is to help with the evaluation; the other is to actually fund the program. In Uganda, The Carter Center and SSI each contribute 25% of the total budget for onchocerciasis. TCC and SSI are responsible for different districts. The government contributes the rest. Right now, APOC (African Programme for Onchocerciasis Control) doesn’t fund Uganda’s programs.

Elie: When APOC was funding Uganda’s programs, how did that work?

Steven: The Ministry of Health [MoH] applies to APOC and APOC sends funds to the Ministry of Health. MoH sends money to districts and it’s all government employees that implement and document the program. Government employees send activities reports and budgets to me. I also make site visits to local villages (where the programs are being implemented). Then, I send reports on to the MoH and the MoH would send them to APOC.

Elie: Where, specifically, do SSI funds go when you fund an onchocerciasis program?

Steven: We send funds straight to the district. Funds are managed by government employees in the district. These are the same people who receive funds from the MoH. The actual treatments are distributed using unpaid, community volunteers, following the CDTI process.

New, promising charity: The Stop TB Partnership

(updated on: ) | by Elie

As part of our current work on developing-world aid, we’ve completed a preliminary report on The Stop TB Partnership. We still have more work to do, but want to share what we’ve learned thus far. Here’s what’s available:

KIPP and self-selection

(updated on: ) | by Holden

The Knowledge is Power Program is one of our current recommended charities, but I think that Sarah Mosle’s critique in Slate is very much worth keeping in mind.

Mosle writes:

While KIPP does have outreach efforts to broaden its applicant pool, only the most determined parents are likely to respond to … sign KIPP’s demanding contract. This dedication suggests a higher value on education within these families, and thus kids better able or willing to learn. And the weakest students, not surprisingly, get disproportionately winnowed. In KIPP’s schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the worst-performing kids have dropped out (or been expelled) in greater numbers in the higher grades; the result has been to inflate the schools’ grade-to-grade improvement.

We agree that the superior performance of KIPP’s students can’t be taken fully at face value, because they may not be a truly representative set of disadvantage students. Our analysis concludes that KIPP most likely is making a difference for the students that it serves, despite these concerns (and Mosle thinks so as well).

However, just because KIPP is making a difference for the students it serves doesn’t mean its model can be fully generalized to close the achievement gap. For one thing, it isn’t clear how many teachers can be found that are at the caliber KIPP aims for. For another, KIPP appears to be aimed at a particular kind of student. I think Mosle’s closing concern is right on target:

But since the biggest debate about KIPP, on both the ideological left and right, is whether or not its methods can work for all disadvantaged children (instead of just a handful of self-selecting families), why wouldn’t it—and its financial, ideological, and media backers—have a strong interest in answering this question once and for all by taking on an entire urban area or even, for that matter, a single neighborhood as, say, Geoffrey Canada has tried to do in Harlem with his Harlem’s Children’s Zone?

There’s something perversely evasive about KIPP’s opening up just one school in Dallas, one school in Albany, N.Y., one school in Oakland, Calif., one school in Charlotte, N.C., one school in Nashville, Tenn., and so on—as if the program recognizes that its best chance at success is to be the exception rather than the rule in any city where it operates.

I believe anyone pointing to KIPP as “the path to closing the achievement gap” is being far too optimistic, although KIPP is a promising way to improve outcomes for the individuals it serves.

Additional GiveWell materials related to KIPP:

  • The summary of our review of KIPP is available here with a link to our full-length review.
  • Our overview of programs aiming to increase equality of opportunity is available here.
  • We’ve blogged about KIPP here and here.