Malaria is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest killers; lymphatic filariasis is one of its most debilitating. Malaria matters reports on new efforts to combat both at once, as they are both mosquito-transmitted. We’re surprised that there isn’t a longer history of such efforts.

Donors interested in microfinance shouldn’t miss the recent posts by Philanthropy Action. Note that Philanthropy Action is co-edited by Timothy Ogden, a member of our Board of Directors.

The coverage discusses papers that we don’t yet see at Innovators for Poverty Action (co-host of the conference and a favorite source of ours). To me the two most interesting posts are:

• A challenge to the conventional wisdom that microfinance should target women. Personally, I don’t find the analysis here very compelling – it’s looking at grants, not loans, and as such the characteristics of clients could be very different from those of a typical microfinance program. I’d be very interested in seeing the same analysis for loans.
• The results of the first true randomized controlled trial on a microcredit program – finding “no impact of access to credit on outcomes for education, health, or women’s empowerment.” This directly contradicts our current, weakly optimistic take, not to mention conventional wisdom. We eagerly anticipate checking this paper out once it becomes available.

As a reminder, our blog is a personal and informal forum, and does not represent the official views of GiveWell. Our About This Blog page states:

While our main site features researched and edited content, aiming to present all our information in a neutral way for you to make your own decisions, our blog is highly personal. Posts do not represent the official views of GiveWell; they represent the unfiltered opinions of project members, who may (and often do) disagree with each other.

We aim to share all of our thoughts relating to the choices faced by individual donors. The Prop 8 issue strikes me as a particularly good opportunity, to the point where I’ve made a personal donation partly on “ROI” grounds (as opposed to purely personal grounds); so I’ve posted my personal decision and reasoning. In general, we have a principle of full disclosing our values and biases, rather than denying or hiding them.

However, GiveWell the organization, as represented by the Board of Directors as well as Elie and me, does not officially endorse or oppose Proposition 8 (and the donation I referred to was a personal one).

I gave to a group fighting Proposition 8 in California because it struck me as a really good opportunity to make a difference with a donation. This is about as far from our normal focus as it gets, and I don’t have nearly the knowledge of political advocacy that I would like to have, so I’m not going to go into this much. But in a nutshell:

• The polling on this issue looks close. Unlike the Presidential election, it may be close enough that some extra advertising could make the big difference.
• I’d also guess that it’s relatively easy to translate dollars into votes for something like this. A lot of people will be turning out primarily to vote for President; a well-done ad or phone call, or just a reminder, could be enough to get them to vote No on Proposition 8.
• As such, I don’t really need to be convinced that the people running this organization are particularly brilliant or have amazing advertising abilities; as long as they’re using money to do things like run ads and make phone calls, it’s probably money well spent. (And there is enough content on the website that I don’t fear fraud.)
• I feel strongly that gay couples should be able to get legal marriage licenses. I think most political issues are more complex/two-sided than advocates recognize, but not this one. If you feel differently, this post doesn’t apply to you, and that’s fine.

I hope that sometime in the future, we’re able to learn more about the conditions under which advocacy money matters and the conditions under which it doesn’t. With what little I know, and even without an ability to remotely quantify it, this seemed like too good of a buy to pass up, so I’m passing it on.

GiveWell has maintained a mailing list since late July that we use to share our notes on research in progress. The emails tend to be more detailed and less theme-driven than blog posts, and the volume tends to be higher (averaging around an email a day, except when we’re heavily focused on non-research aspects of our project).

We are now making the contents of the list (though not the full identities of participants) public. We also invite anyone who is interested in participating to apply via the list’s page; we will approve anyone we feel is applying out of legitimate interest in our research. The list’s page is here:

GiveWell Research Mailing List on Yahoo! Groups

Note that old emails to the list (between its start in July and its opening late last week) are not currently available, due to our recent switch from Google Groups to Yahoo! Groups (the latter offers superior privacy protection for list members).

This book excerpt (via Overcoming Bias) suggests that stressing the health benefits of latrines can be less effective than stressing the pride benefits of “feel[ing] royal, because the royal family had one.”

Also mentions that the Community-Led Total Sanitation program (which we’ve discussed before) stresses “disgust” over safety concerns.

More evidence that health education can work in counterintuitive ways, implying the value of constant experimentation and evaluation rather than merely recording “class attendees.” (Similar ideas discussed previously here).