In 2011, we recommended KIPP Houston as our top recommendation for donors interested in giving to a United States-focused charity. Our recommendation was based on KIPP’s strong track record and KIPP Houston’s funding gap (caused by education funding cuts passed by the Texas state legislature). We recently checked in with KIPP Houston to update our view of its situation.

Our hypothesis was that KIPP Houston needed more funds than it could raise, and our check-in tried to test that hypothesis by seeing whether cuts had been made over the last 12 months.

One note: KIPP Houston is a “standout organization,” not one of our two top charities. We have not put nearly the effort into understanding KIPP Houston as with our highest rated charities. We continue to put the vast majority of our effort into finding and understanding charities that will receive our highest ratings.

In July 2011, KIPP Houston sent us a list of possible changes it might implement in its 2011-12 school-year to balance its budget. (See our blog post from July 2011.) Collectively, these cuts totaled $4.4 million. In addition, it aimed to save an additional $400,000 by identifying “operational inefficiencies” and to increase revenues by increasing its fundraising goal by $1.7 million and utilizing investment income of $1.2 million for operational purposes instead of capital investment.

In February 2012, KIPP Houston sent us a summary of the changes it did implement for its 2011-12 school year:

• Increased fundraising: KIPP Houston has met its goal of increasing fundraising by $1.7 million for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, relative to their original plan. Note that after achieving this goal earlier than anticipated, KIPP’s fundraising team switched to fundraising for the 2012-13 school year, so the document they sent us shows that it exactly met its 2011-12 fundraising goals.
• KIPP Houston saved approximately $5.7 million via spending cuts.
  • $3.7 million of this came via reductions in “KIPP Unique” expenses. Our understanding is that the primary “KIPP unique” changes were: (1) elimination of field lessons, such as trips to Washington, D.C.; (2) reduction of school hours (though KIPP still maintains a higher classroom hour total than the local districts); (3) changes to Saturday school; and (4) summer stipend reduction due to reducing the extended year calendar.
  • $930,000 came from reductions in administrative expenses; $400,000 came from reducing employee compensation (freezing salaries and increasing employee contributions to health plans); $370,000 came from “campus savings” (such as eliminating receptionist positions at schools that could get by without them); and $340,000 came from employing teaching aides as opposed to teaching fellows (our limited understanding is that teaching aides have lower qualifications and experience compared to teaching fellows).

It is not impossible to argue that these cuts should/would have been made regardless of the funding situation. (For example, the cuts to employee compensation may have been driven by the ongoing recession and the state funding reduction causing a reduction in statewide labor costs, rather than being evidence of a KIPP-specific shortfall.) However, overall, we feel that the update on what KIPP Houston has done over the past 12 months supports our earlier hypothesis: that KIPP Houston does face an ongoing funding shortfall, and KIPP Houston has followed through on the plans it shared with us almost a year ago by making significant cuts to its programs.

KIPP Houston has told us that its next update will come during the summer when it approves its 2012-13 school-year budget. We intend to post another update once we’ve reviewed that document.

Update: As of November 2012, we have decided to discontinue the practice of publishing a list of “non-top-rated standout organizations,” so we no longer plan to publish an additional update on KIPP Houston (more here).

Joseph Kony is evil and should be stopped. He has allegedly abducted 30,000 children in his long military campaign.

Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of children every year.

Joseph Kony has committed atrocities that make me furious. But malaria makes me angrier. Why? Because malaria deaths really do happen just because Americans don’t care enough.

The popular Kony 2012 video argues that Kony can be stopped just by making him famous. That might be true. But it might not be. We generally don’t focus our research on military interventions (more below on why we don’t), so we have little knowledge of the situation, but one thing that’s clear is that things aren’t as simple as Invisible Children is making them sound.

• First off, American involvement with pursuing Joseph Kony did not start with Invisible Children’s campaign. It has a long history.
• LSE faculty, writing in Foreign Affairs, state that “the LRA is, in fact, a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence. If Kony is removed, LRA fighters will join other groups or act independently.”
• Some are concerned that pursuing Kony could do more harm than good – not just by diverting resources and attention from more important problems, but via support to the Ugandan army and via provoking possible retaliation.

But we can stop a lot of malaria if we can just care about it more. Insecticide-treated nets drastically reduce malaria; they’ve been tested time and again; they’ve worked on a small scale and on a large scale; they’re safe, they’re proven, they’re cheap and they save lives. (Details at our investigation of insecticide-treated nets.)

The same can likely be said for some other malaria control interventions. The missing ingredient in malaria control? More money – it’s that simple. And you don’t have to lobby Washington to make that happen (though you can); you can also just write a check or get your friends to do so.

Africa has many problems that are like malaria: devastating, but also preventable with donor dollars. (Another one: parasite infections.) Raising awareness of these problems would, I believe, do far more good than raising awareness of Joseph Kony.

So why is Invisible Children focused on Kony?I don’t know exactly how Invisible Children picked its cause, but I have a guess. Invisible Children is excellent at filmmaking and Joseph Kony – while not the worst problem in Africa – is probably the best movie-style villain. The atrocities he commits are unspeakable and emotionally gripping; he is a person, so we can identify with him enough just to truly hate him. He is a face of evil.

Individuals can change the world (and they’re already doing it)Invisible Children is right when it says that the power of individuals is increasing. As a donor, voter and social networker, you have power. With that power comes responsibility. You have to decide whether you’re going to focus on the most important problems for Africans or the most cinematically apt problems for Americans. And whether you’re going to use your power to intervene in a complex, disputed situation that you don’t have the context to fully understand, or in a simple situation where all humanitarians really do agree.

If Invisible Children has inspired you to care more about Africans, that’s great news. We hope you’ll take that inspiration, passion and emotion and take it to the next level. If you can learn how to give as effectively as possible, you’ll join a worldwide community of individuals that is giving millions of dollars and saving children’s lives every year. GiveWell tries to be a crucial cog in that community by putting thousands of hours into research identifying the best charities available.

Note: mothers2mothers has provided a response to this post that can be viewed below.

Summary: mothers2mothers, a well-respected group that focuses on HIV programs in Africa, published figures on its website that we have recently come to believe are erroneous. We feel this finding is important not because of what it says about mothers2mothers, but because of what it says about the wider community that has been funding, awarding, and citing mothers2mothers’s figures.

mothers2mothers (m2m) is a group focused on prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT). It has as many awards – and major funders – as any nonprofit (its size) that we’ve seen.

Its published figures suggest that it serves a huge number of women – specifically, that it accounts for around 20% of all women on PMTCT in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet when we performed a simple check on its figures, we saw major anomalies:

• In some countries, m2m’s stated number of women served exceeds the national total for women on PMTCT, from public UNITAIDS data. (For example, in Swaziland m2m reports ~25,000 mothers served; but UNITAIDS reports a total of ~10,000 Swaziland women on PMTCT for the same year.)
• In other countries, m2m’s stated number of women served does not exceed the national total, but it is enough to account for 50-100% of it. However, looking at the trends in national data, one does not see an increase after m2m’s entry into the country. (Charts below.)

After corresponding with mothers2mothers, we believe that the anomalies we’ve seen are chiefly explained by flaws in mothers2mothers’s data.

mothers2mothers has told us it is now considering adding a disclaimer to its website. It has also provided a response, which is included below.

We feel this finding is important not because of what it says about mothers2mothers, but because of what it says about the wider community that has been funding, awarding, and citing mothers2mothers’s figures.

There is a lot more to the value of a nonprofit than the quality of its data, and there are a lot of questions that a good investigation ought to ask besides whether the numbers add up. We certainly don’t think the anomalies we’ve found show that m2m isn’t doing great work, or that its support and awards are undeserved (and we are still considering the possibility of further investigating m2m as a potential GiveWell-recommended group). Still, seeing this sort of problem from an organization that gets as much attention as m2m seems significant. It’s another piece of evidence that the philanthropic world – including many of the largest and best-resourced funders – is not asking all of the critical questions that it could be asking.

The implausible implications of mothers2mothers’ figures, and how we came across them

We’ve long found mothers2mothers to be potentially promising because of its focus on antiretrovirals for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV, which we consider a priority intervention. We examined mothers2mothers in 2009, and concluded that the evidence of effectiveness it was pointing to didn’t meet our standards (details). In April of 2011, our interest was rekindled when a funder of mothers2mothers told us that mothers2mothers treats a substantial percentage of all the women needing PMTCT worldwide.

Our immediate reaction was: “If that’s true, we ought to be able to see the case for mothers2mothers’s impact in country-level data – perhaps via major improvements in country-level data following mothers2mothers’s entry into a country – and a convincing impact at that high a level would be impressive and compelling.” So we decided to collect the relevant data and see what sort of picture it presented.