De-prioritized charities

Published: November 2012

During our last major open-ended search for potential top charities, we contacted (and in some cases spoke with) a number of charities that we later de-prioritized because we felt they were unlikely to meet our criteria for top charities, and at this point we have indefinitely postponed publishing specific reasons for not going further with these groups, for one of the following reasons (note that no particular one of these reasons necessarily applies to any particular charity listed here):

  • We drafted a review, but the back-and-forth with the charity over whether to publish it ended in unresponsiveness on the part of the charity, and/or became too time-consuming for us. (Note that we always give charities a chance to review our discussions of them before we publish, and that we also always give them the chance to opt for a "Declined to participate" page instead of a charity-specific page.)
  • We initially found the charity to be potentially promising, but based on our continued progress on independent research and investigations of other charities, we no longer believed that further investigation was sufficiently likely to result in a recommendation. A 2012 blog post lays out some of the key shifts that have occurred in our thinking, which have affected which investigations we find most likely to result in a recommendation: in particular, we now believe we are unlikely to consider a charity to have a strong evidential case for effectiveness unless it is focused on an intervention that has a strong independent evidential case for effectiveness.

Organizations in this category:

  • Drug Resource Enhancement against AIDS and Malnutrition (DREAM)
  • Embrace
  • Envirofit
  • Family Health International
  • Fonkoze
  • Jhpiego Corporation
  • Naya Jeevan
  • NetsForLife
  • Operation Smile
  • Project Muso
  • Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS)
  • Solar Cookers International
  • Trickle Up
  • Waste Ventures
  • WaterAid