The GiveWell Blog

Disaster relief report published; Doctors Without Borders, Partners In Health, and Direct Relief International stand out

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Our new report grades major disaster relief organizations on their transparency and accountability to donors. It provides detailed reports on each charity, a summary table with our conclusions, and the full details of our process.

We conclude that Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health and Direct Relief International stand out for the clarity with which they discuss their activities and expenditures.

Over the coming months, we’ll be adding to this report by examining information from the response to the 2004 Asian tsunami. We’ll also be providing some more discussion of non-transparency-related factors behind the donation decision. For example, Direct Relief International and Doctors Without Borders are very different in their focus – the former focuses on distributing supplies while the latter largely facilitates and supplies medical treatment. Personally, I find the latter to be a more appealing vehicle for addressing pressing and challenging needs in a relief situation. Other donors may prefer to support organizations with broader mandates, which are more likely to play direct roles in (for example) providing shelter and assisting with longer-term reconstruction.

That said, we feel that what we have now is a substantial improvement over the information and analysis previously available to donors. It consolidates the clearest and most detailed information provided by each organization, and it can help donors take a first step toward creating incentives for organizations to raise money by being more transparent (and not just more pushy in fundraising) than their competitors.

While we haven’t assessed the quality of individual organizations’ relief efforts, we have accompanied our report with a general overview of what the overall relief effort has and hasn’t accomplished in the year since the disaster, and for how much.

GiveWell’s report on major disaster relief organizations

What is the situation in Haiti a year after the earthquake? What have and haven’t charities accomplished so far?

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Yesterday we discussed how much has been raised and spent for Haiti relief. Today we’ll summarize what we know about how the relief effort has progressed over the last year.

Our detailed and sourced account of the relief effort as a whole will be available by the end of today, and linked here when it is. Update: this page is now available. (Our take on individual organizations will be published tomorrow.) For now, the big picture as we see it is that the relief effort has reached a lot of people with some basic necessities, but that conditions in the camps are still extremely poor, and that there is a dire need to halt the ongoing outbreak of cholera and clear more of the rubble.

  • The relief effort provided immediate shelter assistance, mostly in the form of tarps, within three months of the earthquake, although there has been some criticism that this was slower than it needed to be due to coordination issues. There has also been criticism of the emphasis on tarps as opposed to tents.
  • Conditions in settlement camps, while varied, have generally been extremely poor. One study involving visits to over 100 camps concluded that

    seven months following the earth-quake, 40 percent of … camps do not have access to water, and 30 percent do not have toilets of any kind. An estimated 10 percent of families have a tent; the rest sleep under tarps or even bed sheets. In the midst of the hurricane season with torrential rains and heavy winds a regular occurrence, many tents are ripped beyond repair. Only a fifth of camps have education, health care, or psycho-social facilities on site.

  • Construction of transitional shelters (higher-quality living spaces compared to camps) has been far slower than hoped. 9 months after the earthquake, only about 60,000 people were living in such shelters (out of likely over 1 million people left homeless by the earthquake). The number of transitional shelters has reportedly tripled since then, so things may be improving on this front. Rubble and confusion over land rights have been major obstacles to transitional shelter construction.
  • Water and sanitation efforts have been hampered by the difficulty of operating in a crowded urban area, and have generally been poor, especially in terms of sensitivity to privacy. A massive outbreak of cholera began in October and has led to over 3000 deaths and 171,000 infections nationwide, and is ongoing.
  • A large number of people have been reached with medical assistance and food aid, and we have not seen major criticisms of the relief effort on these fronts. We have also seen no assessments of the quality of medical care or of medical outcomes after the earthquake (i.e., deaths/complications not directly related to the earthquake itself or the cholera outbreak).
  • Rubble removal has been a major problem, and at least 80% (possibly much more) of rubble remains un-managed. Property rights and coordination issues have been obstacles on this front; the difficulty of navigating narrow roads has been an issue as well.

Overall, we’d say that the progress of relief has been disappointing.

One of the questions we’ve been thinking about is whether relief in a situation like this is over- or under-funded relative to everyday aid. I see a few possible interpretations of the disappointing relief effort in Haiti:

  1. Relief organizations aren’t spending money fast enough – they are selfishly/irrationally holding money for later projects that they should be spending now. If they would spend more, the above problems would be alleviated.
  2. Relief organizations are wisely conserving their funds for necessary later rebuilding efforts. If donors gave more generously, relief organizations would be spending more now, and still have enough left over for later rebuilding.
  3. Relief organizations are wisely withholding funds because money isn’t the bottleneck to better outcomes. The logistical and political problems can’t be solved simply by spending more money, and any spending above current levels could be wasteful and even harmful.

Although #1 seems to be the most common narrative in the media, I find it the hardest to believe. All of the public pressure seems to be on nonprofits to spend faster and get quicker, more tangible results. Spending money now seems to be the best move from a public relations standpoint; if it were also the best move from an outcomes standpoint, I don’t see what motivation relief organizations would have for doing otherwise.

#2 seems possible. We have acknowledged that rebuilding Haiti could take all the money that’s been given and more.

However, given the direness and urgency of the current needs – particularly the cholera outbreak and the rubble situation – it seems to me that any effective investment in getting better outcomes now ought to more than pay off later. (Haiti can’t be rebuilt without clearing the rubble or stopping the cholera outbreak; the sooner these are done, the better.) Because of this, and in view of the large amounts given/spent in the context of Haiti’s economy, I lean toward explanation #3: Haiti earthquake relief doesn’t have immediate room for more funding (though this would not preclude having significant needs for more long-term rebuilding funds).

How much money has been given and spent for Haiti earthquake relief? Putting the numbers in perspective

(updated on: ) | by Holden

We’ll soon be releasing an assessment of disaster relief organizations. Though we haven’t found it practical (yet) to evaluate the effectiveness of their work, we’d like to take a broad look at what the relief effort as a whole has and hasn’t accomplished, and for how much money.

This post focuses on the latter: how much funding has come in for disaster relief? Enough to compensate for all the damage that was caused? Enough to make a major dent in people’s suffering? Or not enough to do much of anything?

In brief, it looks to us as though

  • About $5.2 billion has been raised or pledged; about $1.6 billion has been spent.
  • Big-name charities set multi-year fundraising targets in February and had come close to them by July.
  • The amount raised/pledged is equal to about 80% of Haiti’s GDP, and could theoretically provide each person affected by the earthquake with 2.6 years’ worth of a Haiti-average income, or could provide each person left homeless with 5-8 years’ worth of a Haiti-average income.
  • The amount spent is equal to about 25% of Haiti’s GDP, and could theoretically provide each person affected by the earthquake with about 9 months’ worth of a Haiti-average income, or could provide each person left homeless with 1.6-2.4 years’ worth of a Haiti-average income.
  • The total value of the damage could easily be greater than the total amount raised/pledged.

Considering the extent of the damage and logistical challenges, we wouldn’t necessarily expect all of the damage to be repaired, even 5 years from now. Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised to see continued suffering and challenges in Haiti, and we also shouldn’t be surprised or upset that organizations are holding much of the money they’ve raised, for later rebuilding efforts. However, given the large amount available (and the large amount spent) in the context of Haiti’s economy, we should expect to see major and tangible benefits coming from the relief effort.

Details of the numbers above follow.

How much has been given?

The most comprehensive-seeming source we’ve found for disaster relief funding is the OCHA list of all humanitarian pledges, commitments & contributions in 2010 (XLS) found in the collection of 2010 Haiti-related documents on Reliefweb (“OCHA” for the remainder of this post). OCHA gives a total of about $3.5 billion committed plus another $1 billion in uncommitted pledges.

However, this isn’t the whole story – it seems to us that the OCHA data is missing a substantial amount. We compared the OCHA numbers to Chronicle of Philanthropy figures from a July 2010 survey. When there was a charity that we were confident we could identify in both tallies, we put the Chronicle figure for that charity side-by-side with the OCHA figure (see the “OCHA vs Chronicle – diffs” sheet in our analysis (XLS)). Even though the OCHA figures are as of January 2011 while the Chronicle figures are as of July 2010, the Chronicle figure exceeds the OCHA figure for the vast majority of matched charities, sometimes by a very large amount. Just looking at the charities that we can confidently match up between the two implies over $700 million in uncounted funding in the OCHA tally.

These matched charities tend to be the big ones, and collectively account for ~$1.37 billion out of the ~$1.65 billion total for all the figures in the Chronicle tally. (Note that we are using “worldwide funds raised” figures when available; using only U.S. figures would generate a total of $1.3 billion, consistent with the Chronicle’s own figure for the total). Furthermore, the funding that’s come in between July and now doesn’t seem significant – the latest Chronicle total for U.S. giving is $1.4 billion, compared to $1.3 billion in the July report.

So we’d say that the total amount of money given or pledged appears to be at least $5.2 billion (~$3.5 billion given according to the OCHA report; ~$1 billion pledged from OCHA report; ~$700 million in uncounted funding that we identified in the Chronicle tally). More thoroughly counting all the “missed funding” for particular nonprofits could raise this total, though probably not by very much.

The recent Chronicle update also states that about 38% of the funds raised have been spent. This applies to the charities in the Chronicle tally, not to all the agents included in the OCHA tally, but we can estimate the amount spent by multiplying our estimate of the total amount committed (not pledged) by 38%, to get $1.6 billion spent.

Have charities raised as much as they expected/hoped to?

Here’s a comparison of how much a few large charities said they needed in February 2010 (from a Chronicle survey) vs. how much they had raised as of July 2010 (from another Chronicle survey).

Charity Requested as of 2/21/10 Received as of 7/9/10
Partners in Health At least $100 million $85 million
Oxfam At least $100 million $90 million
Save the Children $85 million to $115 million $71.4 million
UNICEF $128 million $73.1 million (US only)
World Vision At least $100 million $192 million

Note that the “Requested” figures above are multi-year appeals.

We don’t want to read too much into this data. The announced “funding needs” may have been formulated more based on what was achievable (i.e., trying to set a “stretch target”) than on what expenses were expected – we don’t know. But the basic picture seems to be that major charities raised close to what they were seeking in the few months after the disaster.

How much has been spent/raised in the context of Haiti’s economy and the damage it suffered?

According to the CIA World Factbook, Haiti had an estimated 2009 GDP of $6.56 billion and a population of about 9.6 million, which implies an average annual income (in U.S. dollars, not adjusted for purchasing power parity) of $680.

$5.2 billion (the amount raised/pledged) is equal to about 80% of Haiti’s total yearly economic output; $1.6 billion (the amount spent) is equal to about 25%.

Using an estimate that 30% of the population was affected by the earthquake (see below), $5.2 billion (the amount raised/pledged) would theoretically be enough to give each affected person about $1700, or 2.7 years’ worth of Haiti-average income (though people affected by the earthquake were largely in urban areas and thus probably had above-average incomes for Haiti). $1.6 billion (the amount spent) would be enough for $533, or about 9 months’ worth of Haiti-average income.

Using an estimate that 1-1.5 million people were left homeless by the earthquake (see below), $5.2 billion would theoretically be enough to give each person left homeless about $3500-$5200, or about 5.1-7.7 years’ worth of Haiti-average income. $1.6 billion (the amount spent) would theoretically be enough to give each person left homeless $1067-$1600, or 1.6-2.4 years’ worth of Haiti-average income.

That wouldn’t necessarily be enough to compensate for all the damage, especially in a logistically challenging situation. One study (PDF) estimated that the earthquake caused $7.2 billion-$13.9 billion worth of damages, which is 1.5-3x the amount of aid given and 1.1-2x the value of Haiti’s annual GDP. We find this study highly unreliable (it is attempting to predict the value of the damage based on a linear regression using a very small number of predictive variables such as the number of people killed, land area, population, GDP and disaster type – see page 6), but we do find it plausible that the total losses for a person left homeless could exceed 8 years’ worth of their income, and thus we find it plausible that the amount of aid raised/pledged is not equal to the value of the damage caused.

A note on figures for “people affected” and “people left homeless”

Unfortunately we haven’t yet been able to find official government or U.N. estimates for these figures, accompanied by details of the estimation procedure; the best we’ve found is various news stories citing the government or nonprofit agencies. The number we’ve seen for “total people affected” is 3 million (citing the International Federation of the Red Cross) and the numbers we’ve seen for “people left homeless” are 1 million (citing the government) to 1.5 million (we’ve seen this number in several places including the Chronicle of Philanthropy but haven’t seen a source for it). This would imply that the earthquake affected about 30% of Haiti’s total population and left 10-15% of the total population homeless (using the CIA World Factbook population estimate of 9.6 million).

Assessing disaster relief organizations

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Over the past year, we have been examining disaster relief organizations, with particular attention to the quality of the information they provide on their work in the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

We don’t think disaster relief is the best cause for impact-oriented donors and we are unable (details below) to apply our standard international aid criteria to disaster relief organizations. However, we think there is a lot of room for improvement in the information currently available for disaster relief donors, and a lot of room to improve incentives for the major disaster relief organizations to be as transparent and accountable as possible.

Questions we’ve focused on

In examining charities’ information, we’ve focused on the following questions:

  1. Financials. Did organizations clearly and frequently disclose how much they were seeking, what they’d do if they raised more than they sought, how much they’d raised and how much they’d spent?
  2. Transparency on activities. Did charities provide specific and comprehensive accounts of their activities in the affected areas? Could someone on the ground verify or refute their claims about how its money was spent?
  3. Results. Did charities publish substantive information on their successes and shortcomings?
  4. Everyday work. Do charities publish clear and substantive information about their non-disaster relief work? We’ve argued before that donations intended for disaster relief may effectively fund charities’ everyday operations instead (even if they are formally earmarked for and allocated to disaster relief). Therefore, we think the quality of (and transparency around) a charity’s everyday work ought to carry a heavy weight in donors’ decisions.

What we’ve found

  1. Financials. Most major organizations have disclosed how much they’ve raised and (less frequently) how much they’ve spent. No organizations have been consistent and clear about how much money they were seeking. In cases where we have been able to find posted amounts sought, the charities posting them generally quickly raised more than they were seeking. In one case the appeal was constantly revised upwards. Despite raising much more than they sought (and than they’ve spent), we’ve only seen two groups that stopped taking donations for the disaster.
  2. Transparency on activities. Few organizations are clear about what they’re doing on the ground. Most give examples and very broad budgets. But with a few exceptions, charities have not given specific enough accounts to givea sense of how they spent their money.
  3. Results. No evaluations seem to be posted yet for Haiti relief. Many have been posted for work on the Asian tsunami; we haven’t yet had time to evaluate these evaluations (and don’t expect to have done so by next week).
  4. Everyday work. Few of the large organizations we examined are clear about how their overall budget breaks down and what they do around the world. There are some groups that are clearer than others.

How we chose organizations to examine

We are unable to predict the location and nature of the next disaster, so it wouldn’t make sense for us to look for an organization with specific ongoing, outstanding, underfunded work (as we usually do). Instead, we wish to focus on the large, global organizations that will probably attract the lion’s share of donor attention and funding whenever, wherever and however the next disaster strikes. To create a list of these organizations, we referred to:

  • The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s tally of which charities had raised how much for Haiti relief as of July 2010. The biggest numbers on this list are likely the biggest money-raisers overall; charities absent from the list likely didn’t raise enough to be of interest, or didn’t share their tallies with the Chronicle (and we feel the latter would be a significantly bad sign for accountability).
  • A list we had made in the weeks immediately following the Haiti earthquake, noting which charities were advertising via Google Adwords for earthquake-related searches. This is a simple heuristic for finding charities that are likely to rely upon, and solicit, donations from the public at large.

Specifically, we rated and ranked any charity that either (a) appeared in the Chronicle tally and advertised via Google Adwords; or (b) was among the 10 biggest money-raisers in the Chronicle tally, regardless of whether we saw its ads on Google Adwords. These criteria produced a list of 19 prominent charities; we added a few more at our discretion.

More information forthcoming

Next week we will be publishing:

  • Detailed writeups on each charity we examined and the information we could find on the above questions.
  • A summary table showing the strength of different charities’ answers to our questions, and noting the charities we think stand out for their superior transparency so far.
  • Full details of our process for creating these pages.

Animal welfare charities

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Added 7/15/21: This blog post reflects the personal views of GiveWell’s co-founder in 2010; it does not represent GiveWell’s organizational view on animal welfare as a cause area. For more on why we don’t currently focus on animal welfare, see here.

We’ve gotten some questions about whether we plan to research charities working on animal welfare, so I wanted to share my thoughts on the cause.

  • It’s easy for me to believe that animals often are treated horribly, and live in horrible conditions, relative to people (even people living under the international poverty line). I believe this applies both to animals in factory farms (one resource on this topic is The Way We Eat, co-authored by Peter Singer, (disclosure: Prof. Singer has actively promoted GiveWell)) and to stray animals, particularly in the developing world (such as those I saw throughout my recent stay in India).
  • It is unclear to me whether charities are good at improving conditions for these animals. Much of what animal-welfare charities seem to focus on is political advocacy, which introduces a substantial set of complications.
  • However, it seems likely to me that there are at least some groups that radically improve the condition of strays, such that if one valued the lives of animals equally to those of humans – or even in the same ballpark – these groups might be competitive with our best charities in terms of what you accomplish for your donation.
  • I do value the lives of animals somewhat. I am very disturbed by what I’ve heard of their treatment in factory farms, and I’m interested in “ethical eating,” i.e., adjustments to eating habits that could create less incentive for this treatment.
  • I do not value the lives of animals equally to those of humans – not even close. I couldn’t bring myself to give money to animal welfare charities that could be spent on global health instead, given what I understand as the realistic range of cost-effectiveness for the two.
  • I recognize that there is a tension between the two points above. One could argue that if I spend more money – or even more time – on my food so that I can eat more ethically, this money or time could have been redirected to helping people in the developing world, and that it’s therefore inconsistent to be interested in “ethical eating” but not animal welfare charity. This argument might be correct, though I believe it is not, and may lay out my thoughts more thoroughly at a later point.

Those are my personal thoughts. For most of GiveWell’s history, the only full-time staff have been myself and Elie Hassenfeld, and Elie values the lives of animals far less than I do. We strongly prefer to research causes that we’re personally interested in, because it’s harder to ask a charity the right questions if you can’t really get behind what it does – so we haven’t given serious consideration to animal welfare charities.

However, we now have an employee who cares more about animal welfare, enough (in our judgment) to potentially do good work researching animal welfare charities. We aren’t yet ready to commit to researching this cause – we need to draw up our plan for next year, which we will be doing soon – but a report on animal welfare charities is a possibility in the next year, and very likely to happen eventually if GiveWell stays in existence.

It’s also possible that we will (eventually) produce content on “ethical eating,” which may be a way (aside from charity) that individuals can spend more money in order to accomplish good. Whether this content fits with our core mission is debatable; it won’t be happening under the GiveWell name in the short term.

Guest post from Jason Fehr

(updated on: ) | by Guest

This is a guest post from Jason Fehr about how he decided what charity to support for his most recent donation. We requested this post along the lines of earlier posts by Ian Turner and Dario Amodei.

Before proceeding, I’d like to thank Dario Amodei and Ian Turner for their excellent guest posts earlier this year regarding their own decision making. I stumbled upon GiveWell in early 2010, as part of a lifelong search for the optimal way to benefit humanity. I’ve been so impressed with the rigor of their logic and the quality of their research that I’ve decided to make GiveWell my primary resource to guide all my charitable giving. Rather than simply rehash what has already been eloquently stated by the staff and friends of GiveWell, I’d like to take a step back and explain a bit of the philosophy that led me to my current state of mind regarding charity.

Whenever I pose the fundamental question of what general life objectives one should have, i.e. what metric to use to determine whether a life has been well lived, I always come back to the same two basic goals: first, to enjoy one’s own life to the fullest, and second, to improve the human condition as much as possible given one’s means and talents. This may seem trite to the subset of people likely to be reading this post, but I think it’s worth stating up front. Some people are motivated by money, fame, power, etc., but I’m writing the rest of this post under the assumption that the “goal” here is to try to use the time and resources we have to make a positive impact on the world.

How do you measure how much good an individual has done? This can be very difficult when you’re dealing with intangibles and vastly differing commodities: how do you compare the impact of Mozart with that of Einstein? Which provides more good: an art gallery or a soup kitchen? So, I decided that impact can be broken down into two categories: elimination of negatives (reduction in death/suffering), and introduction of positives (providing entertainment, emotional fulfillment, etc.). I thought that the first was far easier to measure, less ambiguous, and more universal: only a small sliver of the population might appreciate a beautiful work of art, but I think it’s safe to say just about everyone would prefer not to die or lose their loved ones prematurely, or to feel great pain. For these reasons, I decided to make the elimination of death and suffering the focus of my efforts.

I settled on a straightforward equation by which I would measure my impact: how many people will live healthy, normal lives because I was here who would have suffered or died had I not been here? For most people, this number is probably zero. This is not a criticism; it’s hard to find opportunities to save a life within the realm of most professions. Most people will never encounter a situation where they alone are in a position to save a drowning person or pull someone from a burning building. Additionally, I don’t count a life having been saved if the person who would have replaced you would have done the same thing. For example, I don’t consider a paramedic to be saving several lives a day just because the victims would have died without help. Had that paramedic decided to become a brush salesman instead of a paramedic, a different paramedic would have taken that job and driven the ambulance that day.

So, I consider a life saved/suffering averted only if you achieved something that would not have been achieved had you been replaced by the average person in that position. Using the paramedic example above, let’s say a victim has been shot in the face, and the average paramedic would not have been able to get him to the hospital alive. But, luckily for our victim, today an especially skilled paramedic is on duty; this paramedic has skills that the average paramedic does not, which allows him to get our victim to the hospital safely for definitive treatment. By my calculus, this paramedic has just saved a life.

I work as an anesthesiologist, and I (like most physicians I’m sure) am constantly learning and self-evaluating to ensure I am always providing optimal care for the patients. However, in any profession, there will always be individuals who are more skilled than others. I keep a mental tally of the patients that (in my estimation) are alive and well who would have suffered unnecessarily or died had I been replaced by a less well-trained anesthesiologist. In the three and a half years since I began practice, I think my number is up to about eight, or around one every six months. This mentality also constantly motivates me to be the best practitioner I can be; if I’m not doing a better job than the guy who would have replaced me had I not been there, I need to push myself to be better!

Now turning to giving, I tried to apply the same moral calculus to the world of philanthropy: if I can make a small difference by doing my job well (better than the person I might be replacing), I can make a huge difference by providing something via charity that otherwise wouldn’t have been provided at all. In other words, I think people can make a much bigger difference through careful charitable contributions than they ever can in their everyday lives, virtually no matter what their professions may be.

I wanted to be as sure as possible that any gift I made was being used optimally to improve the human condition. For the reasons I stated earlier, I’ve always tended to gravitate towards charities that aim to reduce suffering and death. Although I didn’t have the means to make a substantial donation until recently, I had been trying for years to determine how to optimally give money to make as great a difference as possible. It seemed that there simply was no consensus of expert opinion; I remember an article in Slate from 2006 in which they asked various writers and academics to whom they would donate a million dollars if they had the chance (there was very little overlap in their answers.)

Since I have a medical background as well as some experience working in the third world, I came to suspect that the lowest hanging fruits would most likely be in nations with the fewest resources. Examples seemed too numerous to count; in school I heard lectures by physicians who had worked in India or Africa, where children would die of diarrhea for want of a simple electrolyte solution, where hospitals would reuse needles since they didn’t have enough disposables, where children were still dying of measles and other vaccine-preventable illnesses (it doesn’t get much more preventable than measles!) It seemed that even a few dollars put into the right hands in the right way could save a life.

When I was young, I was convinced that Africa remained poor because the first world just didn’t care about them. Over the past several years, however, after reading (among others) popular books by economists William Easterly and Paul Collier, I’ve learned that tremendous resources have already been invested in third world development, frequently with little or nothing to show for it. While Easterly has a very cynical viewpoint (he essentially believes that foreign aid has never facilitated third world development), Collier feels that it’s more a matter of certain interventions being effective and others ineffective. I still have an unfinished email in my Gmail account from a year ago that I was composing to Collier asking him where he thought my charity dollars would do the most good. Before I had the chance to send it, I stumbled upon GiveWell.

I promised myself long ago that I would never give to charity just to assuage feelings of guilt or to help convince myself that I wasn’t being selfish walking past homeless people to buy $4 cups of coffee. I had looked into several possibilities prior to finding GiveWell (the Gates Foundation, Africare, disaster relief) but simply wasn’t satisfied with these choices for a number of reasons. In fact, it seemed to me that virtually every cause had a chorus of detractors claiming that the cause was doing more harm than good. I decided to wait and research this further before giving; I actually made no donations at all until 2010 when I found GiveWell.

I actually found GiveWell by accident while searching for more research by the economists I mentioned earlier. As I read through GiveWell the first time, I realized that I had found kindred spirits in philanthropy: the staff of GiveWell started with all the same frustrations that I had felt over the years, but they had found some success in seeking out the answers. I was very excited to read through GiveWell’s philosophy and mission; it seemed that, finally, someone was saying exactly what needed to be said. I looked through their research with my usual skeptical eye, trying to find some fatal flaw in reasoning and analysis. As I read further, I found that every issue that needed to be addressed had already been addressed and evaluated thoroughly.

At this point, I found the analysis on VillageReach, currently GiveWell’s #1 recommended charity. It seemed VillageReach’s approach was having a well-documented impact that was extraordinarily cost-effective. For the first time in my life, I felt comfortable enough with an organization to make regular substantial donations. I have continued to do so over the past year on a monthly basis (I elected to make a recurring monthly donation rather than a single annual donation; this approach allows myself greater flexibility in case new data were to suddenly become available that would cause me to change charities.)

In my own mind, I add the lives saved as a result of my support of Villagereach to my personal total. Although I agree completely with GiveWell that attempting to quantify the cost per life saved requires many assumptions and is at best a rough estimate, I find it exciting to think about the sheer numbers one person can save with precisely the right donation. I’ve started with regular donations of $1000/month. Using GiveWell’s estimate of $545 per life saved by VillageReach, this would be one child death averted every two weeks solely attributable to my contribution (remember, as a comparison, I would estimate that I am “saving” at best one person every six months through my work!) Although it’s impossible to ever have a guarantee in the world of charity, this is the most confident I have ever been. I intend to continue to use GiveWell to guide my giving, and I thank the GiveWell staff for providing me with the tools I need to make an informed choice.

All my life, I had been looking for “the answer”, the low-hanging fruit: if we have so many capable, talented individuals with the means and desire to improve the human condition, why does progress seem so slow in so many sectors throughout the world? I do believe that the answer may simply be misallocation of resources, often despite the best of intentions. What if we could redirect all charitable efforts towards the interventions that actually work, and stop wasting resources on the ineffective ones? What if we could change the culture of the nonprofit sector from one of competition for fundraising to one of competition for the most effective solutions? This, to me, may be the start of a revolution in the world of charity, the start of a movement that changes everything. I, for one, am thrilled to be a part of it.