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 AMREF was in July 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 July 2009 appears below. This content is likely to be no longer fully accurate, both with respect to what it says about AMREF 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: July 2009

AMREF works to improve access to health care in Africa through a wide variety of programs such as training health care providers, providing health education, improving access to water and sanitation, and providing loans and business training to women with HIV/AIDS.1

AMREF publishes an Annual Programme Report that offers a comprehensive review of its year's activities, providing (a) an overview of each project; (b) its cost; and (c) the titles of evaluation reports for each project.2 Interested donors may download these reports at AMREF's publications page.3

Publicly publishing reports such as these is extremely rare among the developing world charities we've reviewed, and we recognize AMREF for its commitment to monitoring and evaluation. However, the details in this report did not meet our criteria for proven impact, and we therefore did not proceed further with AMREF.

Sources

  • 1
    • AMREF, "Our Work in Ethiopia."
    • AMREF, "Our Work in Kenya."
    • AMREF, "Our Work in South Africa."
    • AMREF, "Our Work in Southern Sudan."
    • AMREF, "Our Work in Tanzania."
    • AMREF, "Our Work in Uganda."

  • 2

    AMREF, "Annual Program Report (2007)."

  • 3

    AMREF, "Annual & Financial Reports."