The HealthStore Foundation

About this page

GiveWell aims to find the best giving opportunities we can and recommend them to donors. We tend to put a lot of investigation into the organizations we find most promising, and de-prioritize others based on limited information. When we decide not to prioritize an organization, we try to create a brief writeup of our thoughts on that charity because we want to be as transparent as possible about our reasoning.

The following write-up should be viewed in this context: it explains why we determined that we wouldn't be prioritizing the organization in question as a potential top charity. This write-up should not be taken as a "negative rating" of the charity. Rather, it is our attempt to be as clear as possible about the process by which we came to our top recommendations.

A note on this page's publication date

The last time we examined HealthStore was in 2009. In our latest open-ended review of charities, we determined that it was unlikely to meet our criteria based on our past examination of it, so we did not revisit it.

We invite all charities that feel they meet our criteria to apply for consideration.

The content we created in 2009 appears below. This content is likely to be no longer fully accurate, both with respect to what it says about HealthStore and with respect to what it implies about our own views and positions. With that said, we do feel that the takeaways from this examination are sufficient not to prioritize re-opening our investigation of this organization at this time.

Published: 2009

We investigated the HealthStore Foundation in depth because of its focus on providing high-quality, proven medical treatments in areas where access to quality drugs is often lacking. (For more, see our overview of drug quality in the developing world.)

HealthStore is attempting to create a self-sustaining, for-profit franchise system consisting of its clinics and shops. While HealthStore invites inquiries, its franchise documentation was donated by a third party on condition that it remain confidential. Since HealthStore chose not to share these relevant documents with us, we could not fully evaluate the organization.

We believe that HealthStore may be a strong option for donors/investors who are able to review all of HealthStore's internal documents. However, we believe that individual donors who have not reviewed these documents may want to consider other organizations.