Top Charities Blogs

GiveWell’s 2023 recommendations to donors

4 months 1 week ago

We're excited about the impact donors can have by supporting our All Grants Fund and our Top Charities Fund. For donors who want to support the programs we're most confident in, we recommend the Top Charities Fund, which is allocated among our four top charities. For donors with a higher degree of trust in GiveWell and willingness to take on more risk, our top recommendation is the All Grants Fund, which goes to a wider range of opportunities and may have higher impact per dollar. Read more about the options for giving below. We estimate that donations to the programs we recommend can save a life for roughly $5,000 on average, or have similarly strong impact by increasing incomes or preventing suffering.

Why your support matters

We expect to find more outstanding giving opportunities than we can fully fund unless our community of supporters substantially increases its giving. Figures like $5,000 per life saved are rough estimates; while we spend thousands of hours on our cost-effectiveness analyses, they're still inherently uncertain. But the bottom line is that we think donors have the opportunity to do a huge amount of good by supporting the programs we recommend.

For a concrete sense of what a donation can do, let's focus briefly on seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which involves distributing preventive medication to young children.

Read More

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Isabel Arjmand

Our recommendations for giving in 2022

1 year 4 months ago

We wrote back in July that we expected to be funding-constrained this year. That remains true as we approach the end of the year, putting us in the unusual position of leaving impact on the table.

We've set a goal of raising $600 million in 2022, but our research team has identified $900 million in highly cost-effective funding gaps. That leaves $300 million in funding gaps unfilled. By donating this year, you can help us not only meet but exceed our goal—and say yes to more excellent opportunities to save and improve lives.

Additionally, our giving guidance for donors has changed this year. For the first time, our top recommendation is to give to our new All Grants Fund, which we allocate to any need that meets our cost-effectiveness bar. We think it's the best bet for donors who want to support the most promising opportunities we've found to help people, regardless of program or location. And it reflects our current views on how we can best meet our goal of maximizing global well-being—by taking advantage of every path to impact, whether that's funding top charities, seeding and scaling newer programs, or funding research.

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Miranda Kaplan

The Maximum Impact Fund is now the Top Charities Fund

1 year 6 months ago

We’ve decided to rename the Maximum Impact Fund to better describe what opportunities this fund supports. The Maximum Impact Fund will now be called the Top Charities Fund.

We recently announced changes to our top charity criteria that include a new requirement for our top charities: that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectations about the impact of their programs. Alongside this update, we also introduced a new giving option, the All Grants Fund. The All Grants Fund supports the full range of GiveWell’s grantmaking and can be allocated to any grant that meets our cost-effectiveness bar—including opportunities outside of our top charities and riskier grants with high expected value.

The new All Grants Fund is a complement to what we have called our Maximum Impact Fund, which is granted to cost-effective opportunities among our top charities. However, we’ve received feedback that describing the fund which supports grantmaking only to our top charities as having “Maximum Impact” is confusing in light of the opportunity to support a wider range of opportunities (with potentially higher expected value) through the All Grants Fund.

Based on this feedback, we’ve decided to change the name of the Maximum Impact Fund to the Top Charities Fund.

Read More

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Elie

Changes to our top charity criteria, and a new giving option

1 year 7 months ago

Since 2007, GiveWell has maintained a list of top charities. The organizations and programs on that list have changed over time, but the goal has remained the same: to help donors decide where to give.

In service of that goal, we've spent roughly the last year working on a plan to add to and update our criteria for top charities, so that they accurately reflect our prioritization of funding opportunities and are more helpful to donors. The revised criteria emphasize programs from which we expect high impact, with the additional requirement that we have a high degree of confidence in our expectation.

We hope these changes will also draw a brighter line for donors between our top charities and other excellent funding opportunities we support, a distinction that we haven't always made clear. Recognizing that some donors want to contribute to grants outside our top charities list, we're also introducing a new giving option: the All Grants Fund. Providing this option as a complement to the Maximum Impact Fund is an important step as grants to programs outside our top charities become a bigger part of our work.

Read More

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Elie

Our recommendations for giving in 2021

2 years 4 months ago

You can have a remarkable impact by supporting cost-effective, evidence-based charities.

Just looking at the approximately $100 million GiveWell had discretion to grant in 2020—a subset of all the money we directed to the charities we recommend—the impact of our donors is impressive. We estimate these grants will:

  • Save more than 24,000 lives
  • Treat over 6 million children with a full course of antimalarial medication
  • Provide vitamin A supplementation to over 8.6 million children
  • Deliver over 4.4 million long-lasting insecticide-treated nets (LLINs) to protect against malaria
  • Vaccinate 118,000 children
  • Treat over 11.4 million children for parasitic worms

Read More

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Ben Bateman

Do you have questions about giving in 2020?

3 years 3 months ago

Many people make charitable donations in December. If you're considering making a gift in the coming weeks and you want more information before doing so, we're happy to help!

We're glad to answer questions in writing and on the phone. For written responses, please email donations@givewell.org or leave a comment on this blog post. For a phone call, please fill out this form to request a call with a GiveWell staff member.

We're happy to field questions on topics like:

  • which organizations we recommend most highly today and why,
  • the pros and cons of different donation methods,
  • the tax deductibility of different giving options and the implications of the CARES Act for U.S. donors,
  • support for logistical questions about making a donation,
  • additional details on the Maximum Impact Fund, our top recommendation for donors,
  • and more.

We hope to hear from you!

Read More

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Catherine Hollander

Our recommendations for giving in 2020

3 years 4 months ago

You can have a major, positive impact today by choosing to support organizations backed by strong evidence: our top charities.

We recommend the nonprofits that offer the most impact per dollar we're aware of. In fact, we estimate that you can save a life by donating $3,000-$5,000 to our top recommendation.[1]

If you're a longtime donor, you'll recognize most of this year's top charities. You may even wonder why our list hasn't changed much. However, a tremendous amount of research—truly thousands of hours—has been done to ensure that these organizations continue to meet our high standards. And although there are many familiar names, one is entirely new: New Incentives.

We're proud to share our recommendations and grateful to you for considering supporting them. We hope you'll read on!

Read More

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Catherine Hollander

Maximum Impact Fund update: Q1 and Q2 2020

3 years 5 months ago

Thanks to our donors, we have disbursed $23.3 million in flexible funding to our top charities this year. This generous, flexible support is worthy of celebration!

This post focuses on our decision to grant $15.3 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), which includes the $11.7 million that donors gave to "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's discretion" in the first half of 2020.[1]

AMF supports the distribution of insecticide-treated nets in areas with high rates of malaria. The nets stop mosquitoes from biting and spreading the disease. We estimate our donors' support for AMF will collectively save over 3,000 lives, mostly of young children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Guinea.[2] Without this grant, we think net distributions in DRC and Guinea would have been delayed.

We believe that AMF was the highest-impact choice for this grant. We chose AMF after assessing the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on our top charities, the urgency of our top charities' funding needs, and our estimates of their impact per dollar. We're grateful for GiveWell donors' trust in providing flexible funding to fill this need.

Read More

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Catherine Hollander

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q4 2019

4 years ago

We recently allocated donations made from October through December 2019 to "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's discretion." We granted $11.9 million to Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention program and $1.5 million to Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program.

We allocate donations to "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's discretion" (discretionary funds) quarterly, according to where we see the highest-priority funding needs. Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program and Helen Keller International (HKI)'s vitamin A supplementation (VAS) program had the top-priority needs among our top charities at the time we made this decision.

Malaria Consortium provides preventive anti-malarial medication to young children during the time of year when malaria transmission is highest. HKI supports provision of vitamin A supplements to young children, which reduces their risk of dying of infectious disease.[1] We estimate that the combined discretionary grants to these organizations will save 5,600 lives.[2]

In this post, we discuss:

  • Our process for deciding where to allocate discretionary funds. (More)
    • We share updates on:
      • HKI's VAS program. (More)
      • Malaria Consortium's SMC program. (More)
      • SCI Foundation. (More)
    • We also discuss uncertainties in our decision. (More)
  • Our bottom line for donors giving today. (More)

Read More

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Catherine Hollander

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q3 2019

4 years 3 months ago

In the third quarter of 2019, donors gave a combined $2.6 million to GiveWell for granting to recommended charities at our discretion. We greatly appreciate this support, which enables us to direct funding where we believe it can be used most impactfully. We grant this funding to one or more of our top charities each quarter.

We decided to allocate all $2.6 million to Helen Keller International's (HKI) vitamin A supplementation (VAS) program. HKI is a GiveWell top charity that supports provision of vitamin A supplements to young children, reducing their likelihood of dying from infectious disease. It does so by providing technical assistance, engaging in advocacy, and contributing funding to government-run VAS programs in sub-Saharan Africa. We based our decision on our estimate of the high cost-effectiveness of the work HKI expects to conduct with this funding.

We provide an updated recommendation for donors below.

Summary

In this post, we discuss:

  • what HKI will do with this funding. (More)
  • our process for deciding where to allocate funds. (More)
  • our bottom line for donors giving today. (More)

Read More

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Grace Hultquist

Announcing our 2019 top charities

4 years 4 months ago

We're excited to announce our top charities for 2019. After thousands of hours of vetting and review, eight charities stood out as excellent.

These charities work on evidence-backed and impactful health and poverty alleviation programs serving people in the poorest parts of the world. We've identified specific opportunities for our top charities to use an additional $75 million in donations to save 33,000 lives, $30 million to treat 36 million children for parasitic worm infections, and $450 million to provide unconditional cash transfers to 375,000 extremely low-income individuals. Our expectation is that our top charities can effectively use even more funding than that—that's just a starting point.

Our 2019 recommendation: "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's discretion"

Our top recommendation for donors giving in 2019 is to give to "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's discretion." We will grant these funds each quarter to the top charity or charities where we believe they will have the greatest impact.

The top charity we model as having the highest impact per additional dollar can change throughout the year. To inform our understanding, we ask our top charities to provide us with updated information on an ongoing basis. For example, a top charity may share that it has found new opportunities for impact, such as the potential to work in a new country with a significant need for its program.

In addition, top charities typically receive funding from GiveWell donors and other sources on an ongoing basis. We update our expectations of how much additional funding charities need each quarter by incorporating funding they have received since our last allocation of "Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell's discretion."

Summary
  • Our 2019 top charities (More)
  • How we prioritize our top charities' funding needs (More)
  • New information we learned in 2019 (More)
  • Giving to GiveWell's operations (More)
  • Tips for donating efficiently (More)
  • Questions? (More)
  • More information on our top charities and 2019 review process (More)

Read More

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Catherine Hollander

Why you might get a letter from us this giving season

4 years 4 months ago

We're about to launch another outreach experiment: mailing letters.

Summary

This giving season, we're planning to send a subset of approximately 4,500 GiveWell donors a physical letter encouraging them to renew or increase their support of GiveWell's top charities. We've never done broad outreach to encourage donations through physical mail before.

In the letter, we plan to share our list of top charities, our overall recommendation for donors, and remit materials for individuals who feel compelled to give. We hope the letter helps communicate our research to a group of individuals who have found our work useful in the past to guide their giving. We plan to assess the success of this experiment based on incremental donations that result from the letters.

Read More

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Catherine Hollander

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q2 2019

4 years 7 months ago

In the second quarter of 2019, donors gave a combined $2.3 million to GiveWell for granting to recommended charities at our discretion. We greatly appreciate this support, which enables us to direct funding where we believe it can be used most effectively. We grant this funding to one or more of our top charities each quarter.

We decided to allocate all $2.3 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). AMF is a GiveWell top charity that provides support for the distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria. AMF has been named a GiveWell top charity seven times. We chose to allocate the second-quarter funding to AMF because we believe AMF has a highly cost-effective and time-sensitive opportunity to spend it.

Our bottom line

We continue to recommend that donors giving to GiveWell choose the option on our donation form for "grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion" so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding needs. For donors who prefer to give to a specific charity, we note that if we had additional funds to allocate at this time, we would very likely allocate them to AMF, which we believe could use additional funding for highly cost-effective work, even after receiving the $2.3 million in funding mentioned above.

Read More

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Catherine Hollander

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q1 2019

4 years 9 months ago

In the first quarter of 2019, donors gave a combined $4.7 million for granting to recommended charities at our discretion.

We really appreciate the generosity of our supporters in making it possible for us to regularly allocate funding to the top charity or charities that we believe can best use additional funding. Thank you!

In this post, we discuss our decision to allocate this $4.7 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), as well as the process we followed to arrive at this decision.

We continue to recommend that donors giving to GiveWell choose the option on our donation form for “grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding needs. For donors who prefer to give to a specific charity, we note that if we had additional funds to allocate at this time, we would very likely allocate them to AMF, which we believe could use additional funding for highly cost-effective work, even after receiving the $4.7 million in funding mentioned above.

Our bottom line

As we did last quarter, we focused our efforts on deciding between allocating funding to Malaria Consortium vs. AMF. We currently believe that AMF has a more time sensitive funding need than Malaria Consortium, and our best guess is that it will have equivalent impact per dollar to Malaria Consortium. This led us to allocate funding to AMF.

Read More

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Isabel Arjmand

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q4 2018

4 years 11 months ago

In the fourth quarter of 2018, donors gave a combined $7.6 million in funding to GiveWell for making grants at our discretion. In this post, we discuss the process we used to decide how to allocate this $7.6 million, as well as an additional $0.8 million designated for grants at GiveWell’s discretion held by the Centre for Effective Altruism and $1.7 million in the EA Fund for Global Health and Development (which is managed by GiveWell Executive Director Elie Hassenfeld), for a total of $10.1 million in funding. We’re so grateful to have a community of supporters that relies on our work and is open to allowing us to allocate funding to the top charity or charities we believe need it most.

We noted in November 2018 that we would use funds received for making grants at our discretion to fill the next highest priority funding gaps among our top charities. At the time, we wrote:

If we had additional funds to allocate now, the most likely recipient would be Malaria Consortium to scale up its work providing seasonal malaria chemoprevention.

Based on our analysis in 2018 as well as updates we have received from our top charities since that time, we have decided to allocate this $10.1 million in funding to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program. The SMC program consists of treating children with a course of preventive antimalarial drugs during the time of year when malaria transmission is greatest.

We continue to recommend that donors giving to GiveWell choose the option on our donation form for “grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding needs. For donors who prefer to give to a specific charity, we note that if we had additional funds to allocate at this time, we would very likely allocate them to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program, which we believe could use additional funding for highly cost-effective work, even after receiving the $10.1 million in funding mentioned above.

What Malaria Consortium will do with additional funding

We wrote in detail about Malaria Consortium’s room for additional funding for its SMC program as of November 2018 here. We also spoke with Malaria Consortium for an update in early 2019. Our understanding of what Malaria Consortium will do with additional funding for its SMC program (including this $10.1 million), in order of priority, is as follows:

  1. Contribute to filling a potential funding gap in Burkina Faso, the existence of which depends on the actions of other funders. If the gap materializes, filling it could require up to $3 million in addition to the $5 million that Malaria Consortium expects to have remaining on hand after what’s currently budgeted for 2019 and 2020.
  2. Scale up further in Nigeria and Chad in 2020. Our impression is that, given drug production constraints and the length of time needed to plan for the implementation of a campaign, receiving additional funding now rather than in late 2019 (when we plan to make our next recommendation to Good Ventures to fund top charities) increases the likelihood that Malaria Consortium can use the funding for 2020 programs.
  3. Fund the continuation of programs into 2021. Malaria Consortium has received enough funding to maintain its programs through 2020, but has not allocated funding to maintain programs beyond 2020. To maintain the 2019 program scale in 2021, Malaria Consortium would require an additional $14.8 million in funding, assuming no unbudgeted costs (e.g., additional scale-up) are incurred before then. Our impression is that there is little difference between receiving funding now and in late 2019 in terms of Malaria Consortium’s ability to use it to fund 2021 programs.
Overview of our decision-making process

In early 2019, we checked in with each of our top charities that seemed like plausible recipients of this funding, based on our assessment of their funding needs in late 2018. In general, these check-ins indicated that there weren’t updates in the marginal funding opportunities at our top charities. More details follow in the rest of this post. We refer below to “funding gaps,” which we use to describe the amount of additional funding that we believe could be used effectively (the gap between what charities could use and what they have on hand).

After considering each funding opportunity, we came to believe that the two most promising funding gaps are Malaria Consortium’s for SMC and the Against Malaria Foundation’s. The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), which distributes insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria, currently has the opportunity to fund nets in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); we expect a high level of cost-effectiveness for this opportunity due to high malaria rates in DRC.

We discuss the comparison between these two funding opportunities in the next section. We followed the six principles described in this post in deciding between these two opportunities and ultimately decided to grant these funds to Malaria Consortium’s SMC program.

Comparing Malaria Consortium and AMF

What AMF would do with additional funding

In February 2019, AMF told us it had $62.8 million in uncommitted funds, which it plans to commit to a few 2020 net distributions (these are not yet formal commitments—as of February, AMF had not yet signed agreements with government partners to fund these distributions). AMF told us that if it had additional funding at this time, it would allocate those funds toward closing the gap in funding for nets in DRC for 2020. AMF has also shared more detailed information with us about its plans for the funds it holds and its negotiations with country governments; that information is confidential at this time. AMF reports that the total need for funding in DRC for a universal coverage campaign across eight provinces is between $35 million and $45 million.

Comparison using our principles

Principle 1: Put significant weight on our cost-effectiveness estimates.

We estimate that Malaria Consortium’s SMC program and AMF are similar in cost-effectiveness but that AMF is somewhat more cost-effective on the margin.

The most recent version of our published cost-effectiveness model at the time we made this decision (2019 version 2) estimates that Malaria Consortium is 8.5 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers (“8.5x cash” for short) and AMF’s work in DRC is 10x cash (calculated by making a copy of the spreadsheet and selecting DRC in the “Country selection” tab for AMF).

Our best guess of the cost-effectiveness of these two opportunities incorporates several additional adjustments. See this footnote for details.1We adjust for our guess about how factors that are not formally modeled would change the results. For details, see column AB of this spreadsheet, sheet “Consolidated funding gaps.” This adjustment replicates what we did to arrive at our recommendations at the end of 2018. (More in this blog post.)

For both AMF and Malaria Consortium, we update the country-specific malaria mortality data to be more recent (2017 instead of 2016 figures). For Malaria Consortium, we correct what we believe to be an error in our model (which makes a roughly 5% difference in the final cost-effectiveness estimate), and we have also used an updated method (compared to what we used previously) to account for the fact that the age range of children targeted for SMC differs slightly from the age ranges given in the available age-specific mortality data (3 to 12 months vs. 1 to 12 months). We plan to incorporate these changes into the published model in the future.

For AMF we make several additional adjustments:

– We use DRC-specific cost data and adjustment for insecticide resistance. Our published cost-effectiveness model uses average data for these two parameters when a specific country is selected in the “Country selection” tab.

– We adjust the lifespan of a net downward by 10% for DRC. This is a rough guess based on findings from AMF’s past monitoring in DRC that suggested that nets wore out more quickly than in other locations where AMF has funded nets.

– We use a smaller fungibility adjustment than we do for other countries to capture the lower probability (compared to other countries where AMF operates) that DRC would reallocate funding that it receives from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to cover part of the funding gap for nets if AMF did not fund the distribution. Our understanding from conversations with AMF and the Global Fund is that DRC is relatively underfunded by the Global Fund, due to caps on how much it can spend in a single country and DRC’s large malaria burden, and so our guess is that there is less scope for reallocating funds from other malaria interventions to nets.

– We model most marginal funding as going to DRC, with some funding going to other countries. We do so firstly because we believe having additional funding on hand may lead AMF to commit more funding to other countries than it otherwise might, and secondly because of the possibility of AMF deciding not to commit additional funding or to cap the amount it provides to DRC if it has concerns about the quality of the 2019 distributions it is funding in DRC.

– We adjust AMF’s cost-effectiveness downward by 5% to account for the fact we recently learned that AMF has skipped some post-distribution surveys, leading us to update our estimate of potential misappropriation given missing monitoring results (see this spreadsheet).
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With these updates, our best guess of the cost-effectiveness of these two opportunities is that additional funding to Malaria Consortium is 8.3x cash and to AMF is 10.0x cash, implying that AMF is 21% more cost-effective.

This estimate has not yet been vetted, so is more likely to contain errors than our published cost-effectiveness model. To enable us to pursue other research work throughout the year, we thoroughly revisit our comparisons between top charities once per year for our annual recommendations refresh in November. When making recommendations at other times of year, we ask ourselves “Have there been any major changes that should lead us to reconsider what we concluded last November?” In this case, we adjusted some of the inputs into our cost-effectiveness model to reflect what we have learned since November and found that the results were broadly similar to our published model. At this level of difference in estimated cost-effectiveness, which is small in relation to the uncertainty in the model, we are inclined to put substantial weight on the other principles discussed below, and particularly on Principle 2.

We are also somewhat concerned that funding AMF may create an incentive for AMF to prioritize less cost-effective spending opportunities over more cost-effective ones, thus reducing AMF’s overall cost-effectiveness in the long run. We estimate that the three other countries AMF is in negotiations with are less cost-effective places to work than DRC. If we were to provide funding to AMF for work in DRC, we could be indicating that a “gaming” strategy—in which an organization tells us that marginal funds would go to a more cost-effective opportunity because its funds on hand have been allocated to less cost-effective opportunities—results in additional funding beyond what it would receive if it allocated funding to more cost-effective opportunities first. We don’t want to create an incentive for organizations to prioritize funding less cost-effective opportunities ahead of more cost-effective ones. We haven’t estimated the potential impact of this factor quantitatively.

Principle 2: Consider additional information about an organization that we have not explicitly modeled.

While we incorporate many subjective factors into our cost-effectiveness models, there are additional costs and benefits that we believe may affect the true cost-effectiveness and that we do not believe are adequately captured by our models. Such uncaptured factors might include, for example: information that charities have and we lack about how to best to allocate funding among different locations; beneficiary experiences with the program that affect how much they benefit from it; and the degree to which charities have indirect impact through conducting research, acting as leaders in their fields, or bringing in new sources of funding.

As we generally do not have the opportunity to observe or measure these costs and benefits directly, we consider them qualitatively through proxies. Such proxies include: our perception of how thoughtfully charities answer our questions; whether they are transparent about mistakes they make; how successful they have been in meeting operational goals (such as hiring, geographic expansion, and instituting new technical systems); whether they conduct and publish research; the frequency of errors in the information they share with us; and whether they meet agreed-upon timelines for sharing information.

We plan to write more about factors that we consider outside of our CEA model in the next few months, as well as assessments of each of our top charities on the proxies we use.

Overall, we assess Malaria Consortium as consistently stronger on the above qualitative proxies than AMF.  Both organizations stand out from the vast majority of organizations we have considered for their transparency about both positive and negative results and their track record of collecting information about how their programs are performing. They have both spent a large number of hours over several years (for Malaria Consortium) or over a decade (for AMF) responding to our questions and document requests. This comparison is a relative one, and one that we have not fully justified publicly (but plan to shortly). Based on our experiences working with both organizations, we believe that Malaria Consortium has shown signs of having stronger organizational management.

Principle 3: Assess charities’ funding gaps at the margin, i.e., where they would spend additional funding, where possible.

We’ve accounted for what Malaria Consortium and AMF are likely to do with marginal funding in our cost-effectiveness estimates, above.

Principle 4: Default towards not imposing restrictions on charity spending.

On this principle, there’s no difference between the two opportunities. Funding provided by GiveWell to either program would not be restricted.

Principle 5: Fund on a three-year horizon, unless we are particularly uncertain whether we will want to continue recommending a program in the future.

On this principle, there’s no difference between the two opportunities.

Principle 6: Ensure charities are incentivized to engage with our process.

This principle favors Malaria Consortium, which has consistently provided requested information that aids us in understanding and evaluating their program. AMF has more often been delayed or inconsistent in providing the information we’ve requested.

Other options we decided against (our other six top charities)

Schistosomiasis Control Initiative

The Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI)’s room for additional funding is highly dependent on how much funding it receives from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) over the next three years. As of the time we were making this decision, we had not yet received an update on the level of funding that DFID plans to provide. More information is available in our review.

Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program

Helen Keller International (HKI) told us that it plans to use the funding it has already received for vitamin A supplementation as we expected: to continue its work in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire and to restart work in Niger. With additional funding it would prioritize work in:

  • Kenya, where it could spend about $2 million over three years.
  • Cameroon, where it could spend about $4.2 million over three years.
  • Nigeria, where it could spend $0.6 million to conduct a study of the impact of technical assistance work.
  • DRC, where it could spend about $9 million to reopen a country office and fund vitamin A supplementation over three years.

In November 2018, we estimated that these opportunities were less cost-effective than Malaria Consortium’s SMC program.2For HKI’s programs, see this spreadsheet, sheet “Consolidated funding gaps,” column AB. For Malaria Consortium’s overall SMC program, see same spreadsheet, sheet “Cost-effectiveness results,” row 6. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); We did not revisit those calculations as part of the quarterly allocation process.

Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative

Deworm the World has told us that it plans to follow the prioritization laid out in our recommendation to Good Ventures. That prioritization leaves the following opportunities unfunded:

  • Extending its funding runway beyond 2020 to 2021.
  • Holding sufficient funding for 2020 programming in India that is currently supported by other funders.
  • Improving financial stability via increased reserves.
  • Expanding to new locations (two states in India and one state in Nigeria).

At the end of 2018, we estimated that these opportunities were 15.0x cash on average; however, that average was largely driven by the opportunity to expand to two new states in India, which is relatively low priority for Deworm the World because it is prioritizing financial stability over further expansion. With that in mind, we prefer to allocate funding to Malaria Consortium.

Sightsavers’ deworming program

Sightsavers indicated to us that it plans to follow the funding priorities it presented in 2018, with the exception of one area where there is no longer room for more funding. As a result of that change, Sightsavers has sufficient funding for all remaining opportunities to fund deworming that it currently has capacity to implement.

END Fund’s deworming program

We didn’t ask the END Fund for an update on its funding needs in early 2019, as we didn’t expect that an update would lead us to allocate discretionary funding to its deworming program. More context for this decision is available here.

GiveDirectly

We didn’t ask GiveDirectly for an update on its funding needs in early 2019, as we didn’t expect that an update would lead us to allocate discretionary funding to its work. More context for this decision is available here.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ We adjust for our guess about how factors that are not formally modeled would change the results. For details, see column AB of this spreadsheet, sheet “Consolidated funding gaps.” This adjustment replicates what we did to arrive at our recommendations at the end of 2018. (More in this blog post.)

For both AMF and Malaria Consortium, we update the country-specific malaria mortality data to be more recent (2017 instead of 2016 figures). For Malaria Consortium, we correct what we believe to be an error in our model (which makes a roughly 5% difference in the final cost-effectiveness estimate), and we have also used an updated method (compared to what we used previously) to account for the fact that the age range of children targeted for SMC differs slightly from the age ranges given in the available age-specific mortality data (3 to 12 months vs. 1 to 12 months). We plan to incorporate these changes into the published model in the future.

For AMF we make several additional adjustments:

– We use DRC-specific cost data and adjustment for insecticide resistance. Our published cost-effectiveness model uses average data for these two parameters when a specific country is selected in the “Country selection” tab.

– We adjust the lifespan of a net downward by 10% for DRC. This is a rough guess based on findings from AMF’s past monitoring in DRC that suggested that nets wore out more quickly than in other locations where AMF has funded nets.

– We use a smaller fungibility adjustment than we do for other countries to capture the lower probability (compared to other countries where AMF operates) that DRC would reallocate funding that it receives from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria to cover part of the funding gap for nets if AMF did not fund the distribution. Our understanding from conversations with AMF and the Global Fund is that DRC is relatively underfunded by the Global Fund, due to caps on how much it can spend in a single country and DRC’s large malaria burden, and so our guess is that there is less scope for reallocating funds from other malaria interventions to nets.

– We model most marginal funding as going to DRC, with some funding going to other countries. We do so firstly because we believe having additional funding on hand may lead AMF to commit more funding to other countries than it otherwise might, and secondly because of the possibility of AMF deciding not to commit additional funding or to cap the amount it provides to DRC if it has concerns about the quality of the 2019 distributions it is funding in DRC.

– We adjust AMF’s cost-effectiveness downward by 5% to account for the fact we recently learned that AMF has skipped some post-distribution surveys, leading us to update our estimate of potential misappropriation given missing monitoring results (see this spreadsheet).
2. ↑ For HKI’s programs, see this spreadsheet, sheet “Consolidated funding gaps,” column AB. For Malaria Consortium’s overall SMC program, see same spreadsheet, sheet “Cost-effectiveness results,” row 6. function footnote_expand_reference_container() { jQuery("#footnote_references_container").show(); jQuery("#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button").text("-"); } function footnote_collapse_reference_container() { jQuery("#footnote_references_container").hide(); jQuery("#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button").text("+"); } function footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container() { if (jQuery("#footnote_references_container").is(":hidden")) { footnote_expand_reference_container(); } else { footnote_collapse_reference_container(); } } function footnote_moveToAnchor(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery("#" + p_str_TargetID); if(l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight/2 }, 1000); } }

The post Allocation of discretionary funds from Q4 2018 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Isabel Arjmand

Our updated top charities for giving season 2018

5 years 4 months ago

We’re excited to share our list of top charities for the 2018 giving season. We recommend eight top charities, all of which we also recommended last year.

Our bottom line

We recommend three top charities implementing programs whose primary benefit is reducing deaths. They are:

Five of our top charities implement programs that aim to increase recipients’ incomes and consumption. They are:

These charities represent the best opportunities we’re aware of to help people, according to our criteria. We expect GiveWell’s recommendations to direct more than $100 million to these organizations collectively over the next year. We expect our top charities to be able to effectively absorb hundreds of millions of dollars beyond that amount.

Our list of top charities is the same as it was last year, with the exception of Evidence Action’s No Lean Season. We removed No Lean Season from the list following our review of the results of a 2017 study of the program.

We also recognize a group of standout charities. We believe these charities are implementing programs that are evidence-backed and may be extremely cost-effective. However, we do not feel as confident in the impact of these organizations as we do in our top charities. We provide more information about our standout organizations here.

Where do we recommend donors give?
  • We recommend that donors choose the “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” option on our donation forms. We grant these funds quarterly to the GiveWell top charity or top charities where we believe they can do the most good.
  • If you prefer to give to a specific charity, we believe that all of our top charities are outstanding and will use additional funding effectively. If we had additional funds to allocate now, the most likely recipient would be Malaria Consortium to scale up its work providing seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
  • If you have supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you maintain your support. If you have not supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you consider designating 10 percent of your donation to help fund GiveWell’s operations.
How should donors give? Conference call to discuss recommendations

We’re holding a conference call on Tuesday, December 4, at 12pm ET/9am PT to discuss our latest recommendations and to answer any questions you have. Sign up here to join the call.

Additional details

Below, we provide:

Our research process in 2018

We plan to summarize all of the research we completed this year in a future post as part of our annual review process. A major focus of 2018 was improving our recommendations in future years, in particular through our work on GiveWell Incubation Grants and completing intervention reports on promising programs.

Below, we highlight the key research that led to our current charity recommendations. This page describes our general process for conducting research.

  • Following existing top charities. We followed the progress and plans of each of our 2017 top charities. We had several conversations with each organization and reviewed documents they shared with us. We published updated reviews of each of our top charities. Key information from this work is available in the following locations:
    • Our page summarizing changes at each of our top charities and standouts in 2018.
    • Our workbook with each charity’s funding needs and our estimates of the cost-effectiveness of filling each need.
    • Our full reviews for each charity are linked from this page.
  • Staying up to date on the research on the interventions implemented by our top charities. Details on some of what we learned in the section below.
  • Making extensive updates to our cost-effectiveness model and publishing 14 updates to the model over the course of the year. In addition to updating our cost-effectiveness model with information from the intervention research described above, we added a “country selection” tab to our cost-effectiveness analysis (so that users can toggle between overall and country-specific cost-effectiveness estimates); an “inclusion/exclusion” tab, which lists different items that we considered whether or not to account for in our cost-effectiveness analysis; and we explicitly modeled factors that could lead to wastage (charities failing to use the funds they receive to implement their programs effectively).
  • Completing a review of Zusha! We completed our review of the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development, and Evaluation—Zusha! Road Safety Campaign and determined that it did not meet all of our criteria to be a top charity. We named Zusha! a standout charity.
Major updates from the last 12 months

Below, we summarize major updates across our recommended charities over the past year. For detailed information on what changed at each of our top and standout charities, see this page.

  • We removed Evidence Action’s No Lean Season from our top charity list. At the end of 2017, we named No Lean Season, a program that provides loans to support seasonal migration in Bangladesh, as one of GiveWell’s top charities. This year, we updated our assessment of No Lean Season based on preliminary results we received from a 2017 study of the program. These results suggested the program did not successfully induce migration in the 2017 lean season. Taking this new information into account alongside previous studies of the program, we and Evidence Action no longer believe No Lean Season meets our top charity criteria. We provide more details on this decision in this blog post.
  • We received better information about Sightsavers’ deworming program. In previous years, we had limited information from Sightsavers documenting how it knew that its deworming programs were effectively reaching their intended beneficiaries. This year, Sightsavers shared significantly more monitoring information with us. This additional information substantially increased our confidence in Sightsavers’ deworming program. This spreadsheet shows the monitoring we received from Sightsavers in 2018.
  • We reviewed new research on the priority programs implemented by our top charities and updated our views and cost-effectiveness analyses accordingly. Examples of such updates include:
Recommended allocation of funding for Good Ventures and top charities’ remaining room for more funding Allocation recommended to Good Ventures

Good Ventures is a large foundation with which GiveWell works closely; it has been a major supporter of GiveWell’s top charities since 2011. Each year, we provide recommendations to Good Ventures regarding how we believe it can most effectively allocate its grants to GiveWell’s recommended charities, in terms of the total amount donated (within the constraints of Good Ventures’ planning, based in part on the Open Philanthropy Project’s recommendations on how to allocate funding across time and across cause areas) as well as the distribution between recipient charities.

Because Good Ventures is a major funder that we expect to follow our recommendations, we think it’s important for other donors to take its actions into account; we also want to be transparent about the research that leads us to make our recommendations to Good Ventures. That said, Good Ventures has not finalized its plans for the year and may give differently from what we’ve recommended. We think it’s unlikely that any differences would have major implications for our bottom-line recommendations for other donors.

This year, GiveWell recommended that Good Ventures grant $64.0 million to our recommended charities, allocated as shown in the table below.

Charity Recommended allocation from Good Ventures Remaining room for more funding1This column displays our top charities’ remaining room for more funding, or the amount we believe they can use effectively, for the next three years (2019-2021), after accounting for the $64.0 million we’ve recommended that Good Ventures give (our recommendation won’t necessarily be followed, but we think it’s unlikely that differences will be large enough to affect our bottom-line recommendation to donors) and an additional $1.1 million from GiveWell’s discretionary funding. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_1").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_1", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Malaria Consortium (SMC program) $26.6 million $43.9 million Evidence Action (Deworm the World Initiative) $10.4 million $27.0 million Sightsavers (deworming program) $9.7 million $1.6 million Helen Keller International (VAS program) $6.5 million $20.6 million Against Malaria Foundation $2.5 million $72.5 million Schistosomiasis Control Initiative $2.5 million $16.9 million The END Fund (deworming program) $2.5 million $45.8 million GiveDirectly $2.5 million >$100 million Standout charities $800,000 (combined)

We discuss our process for making our recommendation to Good Ventures in detail in this blog post.

Allocation of GiveWell discretionary funds

As part of reviewing our top charities’ funding gaps to make a recommendation to Good Ventures, we also decided how to allocate the $1.1 million in discretionary funding we currently hold. The latter comes from donors who chose to donate to “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” in recent months. We decided to allocate this funding to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program, due to how large and cost-effective we believe Malaria Consortium’s funding gap is.

Top charities’ remaining room for more funding

Although we are expecting to direct a significant amount of funding to our top charities ($65.1 million between Good Ventures and our discretionary funding), we believe that nearly all of our top charities could productively absorb considerably more funding than we expect them to receive from Good Ventures, our discretionary funding, and additional donations we direct based on our recommendation. This spreadsheet lists all of our top charities’ funding needs; rows 70-79 show total funding gaps by charity.

Our recommendation for donors The bottom line
  • We recommend that donors choose the option to support “Grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion” on our donate forms. We grant these funds quarterly to the GiveWell top charity or top charities where we believe they can do the most good. We take into account charities’ funding needs and donations they have received from other sources when deciding where to grant discretionary funds. (The principles we outline in this post are indicative of how we will make decisions on what to fund.) We then make these grants to the highest-value funding opportunities we see among our recommended charities. This page lists discretionary grants we have made since 2014.
  • If you prefer to give to a specific charity, we believe that all of our top charities are outstanding and will use additional funding effectively. See below for information that may be helpful in deciding between charities we recommend.
  • If we had additional funds to allocate, the most likely recipient would be Malaria Consortium to scale up its work providing seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
Comparing our top charities

If you’re interested in donating to a specific top charity or charities, the following information may be helpful as you compare the options on our list. The table summarizes key facts about our top charities; column headings are defined below.

Note: the cost-effectiveness estimates we present in this post differ from those in our published cost-effectiveness analysis for a number of reasons.2“The cost-effectiveness estimates in this sheet, which we used to inform our recommended allocation differ from those in our published cost-effectiveness analysis because (1) we apply a number of adjustments to incorporate additional information (2) we apply different weightings to each program (which affects the weighted average of cost-effectiveness).” Source: Giving Season 2018 – Allocation (public), “Cost-effectiveness results” tab, row 17. Additional details at the link. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });

Organization Modeled cost-effectiveness (relative to cash transfers) at the present margin3For sources on the estimates included in this table, see this spreadsheet, “Cost-effectiveness results” tab. The estimates presented here differ from the estimates presented in our recommendation to Good Ventures because they estimate cost-effectiveness on the margin, if Good Ventures were to follow our recommendations. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_3").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_3", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Primary benefits of the intervention Quality of the organization’s communication Ongoing monitoring and likelihood of detecting future problems Malaria Consortium (SMC program) 8.8 Averting deaths of children under 5 Strong Strong Evidence Action (Deworm the World Initiative) See footnote4At the margin, we expect additional funding to Deworm the World Initiative to support its programs in Pakistan and Nigeria in 2021 as well as Deworm the World’s general reserves. We think these are broadly good uses of funds, but our cost-effectiveness model is not currently built to meaningfully model the cost-effectiveness of reserves. In the absence of more information, we would guess that additional funding to Deworm the World would be roughly in the range of our estimate for Deworm the World’s overall organizational cost-effectiveness (~15x as cost-effective as cash transfers), but we have not analyzed the details of additional spending at the current margin enough to be confident in that estimate. However, if Good Ventures generally follows our recommended allocation, we expect that Deworm the World will have sufficient funding to continue its most time-sensitive work and we can decide whether to fund other marginal opportunities at a later date. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_4").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_4", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Possibly increasing income in adulthood Strong Strong Helen Keller International (VAS program) 6.4 Averting deaths of children under 5 Strong Moderate Against Malaria Foundation 7.3 Averting deaths Moderate Moderate Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 8.3 Possibly increasing income in adulthood Moderate Relatively weak Sightsavers (deworming program) See footnote5We do not have a strong sense of the cost-effectiveness of additional funds to Sightsavers at the current margin. Our cost-effectiveness estimate of Sightsavers’ remaining funding gap is 15.4x as cost-effective as cash transfers, but this fails to capture a number of features particular to the program Sightsavers would fund on the margin. We would guess that the value of marginal funding to Sightsavers is roughly in the range of our overall estimate for Sightsavers of ~12x as cost-effective as cash transfers.

One major reason for our uncertainty follows. As discussed here, Sightsavers’ prioritization of how to spend additional funds differed substantially from what would be implied by our cost-effectiveness analysis, but we think that this discrepancy may largely be due to factors that our model does not capture or ways our model may be inaccurate; therefore, it is difficult to rely on our model to assess the cost-effectiveness of specific remaining country funding gaps.

jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_5").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_5", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Possibly increasing income in adulthood Moderate Moderate The END Fund (deworming program) 5.4 Possibly increasing income in adulthood Moderate Relatively weak GiveDirectly 1 Immediately increasing income and assets Strong Strong

Definitions of column headings follow:

  • Estimated cost-effectiveness (relative to cash transfers) at the present margin. We recommended that Good Ventures give $64.0 million to our top and standout charities, prioritizing the funding gaps that we believe are most cost-effective. The table above shows our estimates for the cost-effectiveness of additional donations to each charity, after accounting for the $64.0 million we’ve recommended that Good Ventures give (our recommendation won’t necessarily be followed, but we think it’s unlikely that differences will be large enough to affect our bottom-line recommendation to donors).
  • Primary benefits of the intervention. This column describes the major benefit we see to supporting a charity implementing this intervention.
  • Quality of the organization’s communication. In most cases, we have have spent dozens or hundreds of hours interacting with our top charities. Here, we share our subjective impression of how well each organization has communicated with us. Our assessment of the quality of a charity’s communications is driven by whether we have been able to resolve our questions—particularly our less straightforward questions—about the organization’s activities, impact, and plans; how much time and effort was required to resolve those questions; how often the charity has sent us information that we later learned is inaccurate; and how direct we believe the charity is in acknowledging their weaknesses and mistakes.

    The organizations that stand out for high-quality communications are those that have most thoughtfully and completely answered our questions; brought problems with the program to our attention; and communicated clearly with us about timelines for providing additional information. High-quality communications reduce the time that we need to spend answering each question and therefore allow us to gain a greater degree of confidence in an organization. More importantly, our communication with an organization is one of the few ways that we can directly observe an organization’s general competence and thoughtfulness, so we see this as a proxy for unobserved ways in which the organization’s staff affect the impact of the program.

  • Ongoing monitoring and likelihood of detecting future problems. The quality of the monitoring we have received from our top charities varies widely, although we believe it stands out from that of the majority of charities. Ideally, the monitoring data charities collect would be representative of the program overall (by sampling all or a random selection of locations or other relevant units); would measure the outcomes of greatest interest for understanding the impact of the program; and would use methods that result in a low risk of bias or fraud in the results. In assessing the quality of a charity’s monitoring, we ask ourselves, “how likely do we believe it is that there are substantive problems with the program that are not detected by this monitoring?”

    Monitoring results inform our cost-effectiveness analyses directly. In addition, we believe that the quality of an organization’s monitoring give us information that is not fully captured in these analyses. Similar to how we view communication quality, we believe that understanding how an organization designs and implements monitoring is a opportunity to observe its general competence and degree of openness to learning and program improvement.

Other key factors donors might want to consider when making their giving decision:

  • As shown in the table above, our top charities implement programs with different primary benefits: some primarily avert deaths; others primarily increase incomes or consumption. Donors’ preference for programs that avert deaths relative to those that increase incomes (or how one weighs the value of averting a death at a given cost or increasing incomes a certain amount at a given cost) depends on their moral values. The cost-effectiveness estimates shown above rely on the GiveWell research team’s moral values. For more on how we (and others) compare the “good” accomplished by different programs, see this blog post. Donors may make a copy of our cost-effectiveness model to input their own moral weights and see how that impacts the relative cost-effectiveness of our top charities.
  • The table above shows cost-effectiveness estimates for different charities. We put significant weight on cost-effectiveness figures, but they have limitations. Read more about how we use cost-effectiveness estimates in this blog post.
  • Ultimately, donors are faced with a decision about how to weigh estimated cost-effectiveness (incorporating their moral values) against additional information about an organization that we have not explicitly modeled. We’ve written about this choice in the context of choosing between GiveDirectly and SCI in this 2016 blog post.
  • Four of our top charities implement deworming programs. We recommend the provision of deworming treatments to children for its possible impact on recipients’ incomes in adulthood. We work in an expected value framework; in other words, we’re willing to support a higher-risk intervention if it has the potential for higher impact (more in this post about our worldview). Deworming is such an intervention. We believe that deworming may have very little impact, but that risk is outweighed by the possibility that it has very large impact, and it’s very cheap to implement. We describe our assessment of deworming in this summary blog post as well as this detailed post. Donors who have lower risk tolerance may choose not to support charities implementing deworming programs.
  • The table above lists our views on the quality of each of our top charities’ monitoring. This 2016 blog post describes our view of AMF’s monitoring and may give donors more insight into how we think about monitoring quality.
Giving to support GiveWell’s operations

GiveWell is currently in a financially stable position. Over the next few years, we are planning to significantly increase our spending, driven by hiring additional research and outreach staff. We project that our revenue will approximately equal our expenses over the next few years; however, this projection includes an expectation of growth in the level of operating support we receive.

We retain our “excess assets policy” to ensure that if we fundraise for our own operations beyond a certain level, we will grant the excess to our recommended charities. In June of 2018, we applied our excess assets policy and designated $1.75 million in unrestricted funding for grants to recommended charities.

We cap the amount of operating support we ask Good Ventures to provide to GiveWell at 20 percent of our operating expenses, for reasons described here. We ask that donors who use GiveWell’s research consider the following:

  • If you have supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you maintain your support. Having a strong base of consistent operations support allows us to make valuable hires when opportunities arise and to minimize staff time spent on fundraising for our operating expenses.
  • If you have not supported GiveWell’s operations in the past, we ask that you designate 10 percent of your donation to help fund GiveWell’s operations. This can be done by selecting the option to “Add 10% to help fund GiveWell’s operations” on our credit card donation form or letting us know how you would like to designate your funding when giving another way.
Questions?

We’re happy to answer questions in the comments below. Please also feel free to reach out directly with any questions.

This post was written by Andrew Martin, Catherine Hollander, Elie Hassenfeld, James Snowden, and Josh Rosenberg.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ This column displays our top charities’ remaining room for more funding, or the amount we believe they can use effectively, for the next three years (2019-2021), after accounting for the $64.0 million we’ve recommended that Good Ventures give (our recommendation won’t necessarily be followed, but we think it’s unlikely that differences will be large enough to affect our bottom-line recommendation to donors) and an additional $1.1 million from GiveWell’s discretionary funding. 2. ↑ “The cost-effectiveness estimates in this sheet, which we used to inform our recommended allocation differ from those in our published cost-effectiveness analysis because (1) we apply a number of adjustments to incorporate additional information (2) we apply different weightings to each program (which affects the weighted average of cost-effectiveness).” Source: Giving Season 2018 – Allocation (public), “Cost-effectiveness results” tab, row 17. Additional details at the link. 3. ↑ For sources on the estimates included in this table, see this spreadsheet, “Cost-effectiveness results” tab. The estimates presented here differ from the estimates presented in our recommendation to Good Ventures because they estimate cost-effectiveness on the margin, if Good Ventures were to follow our recommendations. 4. ↑ At the margin, we expect additional funding to Deworm the World Initiative to support its programs in Pakistan and Nigeria in 2021 as well as Deworm the World’s general reserves. We think these are broadly good uses of funds, but our cost-effectiveness model is not currently built to meaningfully model the cost-effectiveness of reserves. In the absence of more information, we would guess that additional funding to Deworm the World would be roughly in the range of our estimate for Deworm the World’s overall organizational cost-effectiveness (~15x as cost-effective as cash transfers), but we have not analyzed the details of additional spending at the current margin enough to be confident in that estimate. However, if Good Ventures generally follows our recommended allocation, we expect that Deworm the World will have sufficient funding to continue its most time-sensitive work and we can decide whether to fund other marginal opportunities at a later date. 5. ↑ We do not have a strong sense of the cost-effectiveness of additional funds to Sightsavers at the current margin. Our cost-effectiveness estimate of Sightsavers’ remaining funding gap is 15.4x as cost-effective as cash transfers, but this fails to capture a number of features particular to the program Sightsavers would fund on the margin. We would guess that the value of marginal funding to Sightsavers is roughly in the range of our overall estimate for Sightsavers of ~12x as cost-effective as cash transfers.

One major reason for our uncertainty follows. As discussed here, Sightsavers’ prioritization of how to spend additional funds differed substantially from what would be implied by our cost-effectiveness analysis, but we think that this discrepancy may largely be due to factors that our model does not capture or ways our model may be inaccurate; therefore, it is difficult to rely on our model to assess the cost-effectiveness of specific remaining country funding gaps.

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The post Our updated top charities for giving season 2018 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Catherine Hollander

Our recommendation to Good Ventures

5 years 4 months ago

Today, we announce our list of top charities for the 2018 giving season. We expect to direct over $100 million to the eight charities on our list as a result of our recommendation.

Good Ventures, a large foundation with which we work closely, is the largest single funder of our top charities. We make recommendations to Good Ventures each year for how much funding to provide to our top charities and how to allocate that funding among them. As this funding is significant, we think it’s important for other donors to take into account the recommendation we make to Good Ventures.

This blog post explains in detail how we decide what to recommend to Good Ventures and why; we want to be transparent about the research that leads us to our recommendations to Good Ventures. If you’re interested in a bottom-line recommendation for where to donate this year, please view our post with recommendations for non-Good Ventures donors.

Note that Good Ventures has not finalized its plans for the year and may give differently from what we’ve recommended. We think it’s unlikely that any differences would have major implications for our bottom-line recommendations for other donors.

Summary

In this post, we discuss:

How we decided how much funding to recommend to Good Ventures

This year, GiveWell recommended that Good Ventures grant $64.0 million to our top charities and standout charities. The amount Good Ventures gives to our top charities is based in part on how the Open Philanthropy Project plans to allocate funding across time and across cause areas. (Read more about our relationships with Good Ventures and the Open Philanthropy Project here.)

The Open Philanthropy Project currently plans to allocate around 10% of its total available capital to “straightforward charity,” which it currently allocates to global health and development causes based on GiveWell’s recommendations. This 10% allocation includes two “buckets”—a fixed percentage of total giving each year of 5% and another “flexible” bucket of 5%, which can be spent down quickly (over a few years) or slowly (over many years). GiveWell’s recommendation that Good Ventures grant $64.0 million this year puts the flexible bucket on track to be spent down within the next 14 years.

We’re recommending $64.0 million this year to balance two considerations:

  • As the world gets richer, giving opportunities in global health and development generally seem likely to get worse over time. This implies that giving now has a larger impact.
  • In the coming years, GiveWell may find opportunities that are considerably more cost-effective than our current recommendations (e.g., among policy advocacy organizations). This would make spending in future years have a larger impact.
Our recommended allocation for Good Ventures

The table below summarizes how much funding we recommend Good Ventures grant to each of our top charities, along with our explicit cost-effectiveness estimate for each organization and organizational factors we don’t model explicitly that affect our assessment of impact.

As always, cost-effectiveness figures should be interpreted with caution.

Note: the cost-effectiveness estimates we present in this post differ from those in our published cost-effectiveness analysis for a number of reasons.1“The cost-effectiveness estimates in this sheet, which we used to inform our recommended allocation differ from those in our published cost-effectiveness analysis because (1) we apply a number of adjustments to incorporate additional information (2) we apply different weightings to each program (which affects the weighted average of cost-effectiveness).” Source: See Giving Season 2018 – Allocation (public), “Cost-effectiveness results” tab, row 17. Additional details at the link. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_8881_1").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_8881_1", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });

Charity Modeled cost-effectiveness (relative to cash transfers)2“We typically won’t move forward with a charity in our process if it appears that it won’t meet the threshold of at least 2-3x as cost-effective as cash transfers. We think cash transfers are a reasonable baseline to use due to the intuitive argument that if you’re going to help someone with Program X, Program X should be more cost-effective than just giving someone cash to buy that which they need most.” June 1, 2017, GiveWell blog, How GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses. The estimates presented here differ from the estimates presented in our recommendation to donors because they estimate weighted average cost-effectiveness over the whole funding gap, rather than on the margin. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_8881_2").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_8881_2", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Organizational factors we don’t model explicitly3We take into account an organization’s strength of communication with us and the comprehensiveness of its program monitoring. We factor this into our broad assessment of the organization’s cost-effectiveness. Read more: November 26, 2018, GiveWell blog, Our updated top charities for giving season 2018. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_8881_3").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_8881_3", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Recommended allocation Malaria Consortium (SMC program) 8.8 Very strong $26.6 million Evidence Action (Deworm the World Initiative) 14.6 Very strong $10.4 million Sightsavers (deworming program) 12.0 Moderate $9.7 million Helen Keller International (VAS program) 7.0 Strong $6.5 million Against Malaria Foundation 7.3 Moderate $2.5 million Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 8.3 Relatively weak $2.5 million The END Fund (deworming program) 5.4 Relatively weak $2.5 million GiveDirectly 1 Very strong $2.5 million Standout charities $800,000 (combined) Sum $64.0 million

The underlying objective of GiveWell’s allocation is to direct as much money as possible to the most cost-effective giving opportunities over the long run. (We aim to optimize cost-effectiveness, as defined broadly—we recognize the limitations of our cost-effectiveness model and consider additional factors in our assessment.) We relied on modeled cost-effectiveness figures as well as the organizational factors described above to inform our recommendations.

To meet this objective, our allocation this year was driven by the principles described below.

Principles we followed in arriving at this allocation

Principle 1: Put significant weight on our cost-effectiveness estimates. Our cost-effectiveness estimates incorporate a substantial amount of information relevant to our decisionmaking. While we recognize the high levels of uncertainty around our cost-effectiveness estimates, they are the single largest factor we take into consideration. More on how we use cost-effectiveness to inform our decisions here.

Principle 2: Consider additional information about an organization that we have not explicitly modeled. While our cost-effectiveness estimates are the best tool we know of to estimate the amount of good a charity accomplishes, we believe it’s infeasible to try to incorporate all relevant considerations into a single quantitative estimate. Subjective assessments that aren’t included in our cost-effectiveness calculations but affect how much impact a charity has include:

  • A charity’s ability to make good decisions on how to prioritize. Our top charities often take factors that aren’t included in our cost-effectiveness estimates into account when deciding how to spend their limited budgets. We use our subjective assessment of how well charities answer our questions about their activities as a proxy for how well they make these decisions.
  • Upside. Our top charities often perform activities that go beyond the scope of their direct work, such as conducting and sharing research that influences others, or raising funds for their programs from funders that would otherwise give to less cost-effective programs.

For the most part, we do not have the opportunity to directly observe these factors. Our subjective assessments of these factors are based on the observed but unmodeled factors that we discuss in this post: the quality of the organization’s communication and ongoing monitoring, and the likelihood of detecting future problems.

Principle 3: Assess charities’ funding gaps at the margin, i.e., where they would spend additional funding, where possible. We try to understand how charities’ funding would be spent among different programs or locations. Our cost-effectiveness estimates for charities’ projects often vary substantially (depending, for example, on the underlying disease burden in a particular country the charity plans to work in). Where possible, we compare our best guess of how funding would be used on the margin, rather than on average. As part of assessing charities’ marginal cost-effectiveness, we intend to capture whether there are diminishing returns to their receiving additional funding.

Principle 4: Default towards not imposing restrictions on charity spending. While we rely on our expectation of how charities would prioritize funding gaps to estimate marginal cost-effectiveness, we do not plan to impose any restrictions on how the funding is actually used in practice. (There is one exception to this: in cases where a top charity implements multiple global health and development programs and our recommendation is restricted to one of those programs, we do restrict funding to the priority program we recommend, such as deworming or vitamin A supplementation.) We believe our top charities are often better placed to make decisions about which projects to fund than we are, and we want to ensure maximum flexibility for them to do so.

Principle 5: Fund on a three-year horizon, unless we are particularly uncertain whether we will want to continue recommending a program in the future. Our top charities have communicated to us that there are often substantial benefits to knowing that funding for a program is secure for the future. As a general rule, we aim to provide funding for three years for each program we choose to fund. The exception is when we are more uncertain whether we would want to renew funding for a third year (e.g. because our estimated cost-effectiveness of a program is close to the marginal program we decided not to fund).

Principle 6: Ensure charities are incentivized to engage with our process. We recognize that our charity review process requires deep engagement from senior members of charities’ staff. We want to ensure that charities are incentivized to keep engaging with our process. To this end, since 2016, we recommended that Good Ventures provide a minimum “incentive grant” to top charities ($2.5 million) and standout charities ($100,000).

We hope that providing significant incentive grants increases the chances that charities are motivated to compete for a GiveWell recommendation. We fear that without ensuring that every top charity or standout receives a substantial amount of funding, some charities might be deterred from applying for a GiveWell recommendation or from making changes to their programs to potentially become top charities.

Our process for determining our recommended allocation for Good Ventures

In line with the principles above, we used the following process to arrive at our recommended allocation for Good Ventures:

  1. We recommended that Good Ventures provide each charity with an incentive grant ($2.5 million per top charity and $100,000 per standout charity).
  2. We identified the most cost-effective gap we were unable to entirely fill with the $64.0 million we recommended to Good Ventures (noting again that Good Ventures has not finalized its plans for the year and may give differently from what we’ve recommended): Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Chad. Our cost-effectiveness analysis suggests this gap is about 8.8x as cost-effective as cash transfers, and that Malaria Consortium could absorb about $70 million in additional funding to support this work. We have a high opinion of Malaria Consortium as an organization, and this qualitative assessment supports our consideration of this gap as highly cost-effective to fill.

    Our best guess is there are limited diminishing marginal returns over the interval of this funding gap.

  3. Remaining funding gaps were compared to the Malaria Consortium funding gap in Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Chad based on (i) their estimated cost-effectiveness, (ii) our subjective assessment of the organization’s quality, and (iii) particular arguments relevant to that funding gap but not captured elsewhere in our analysis (e.g., whether our decision to not fund a particular gap would be disproportionately disruptive to an organization’s activities).

This spreadsheet lists all of our top charities’ funding needs; rows 70-79 show total funding needs gaps by charity. We relied on this list of funding needs in determining our recommendation to Good Ventures, as well as in making our assessment of how much additional funding our top charities can absorb, after taking into account our recommendation to Good Ventures.

In brief, we concluded that some charities’ funding gaps compared favorably to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention gap, which led us to recommend a total of ~$6-10 million in funding to each of Deworm the World Initiative, Sightsavers’ deworming program, and Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program. We did not see compelling reasons to recommend funding to the other top charities ahead of Malaria Consortium’s funding gap, so we only recommended that those charities receive the $2.5 million incentive grant.

We explain our recommended allocation to Good Ventures for each of our top charities in more detail on this page.

Questions?

We’re happy to answer questions in the comments below. Please also feel free to reach out directly with any questions.

This post was written by Andrew Martin, Catherine Hollander, Elie Hassenfeld, James Snowden, and Josh Rosenberg.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ “The cost-effectiveness estimates in this sheet, which we used to inform our recommended allocation differ from those in our published cost-effectiveness analysis because (1) we apply a number of adjustments to incorporate additional information (2) we apply different weightings to each program (which affects the weighted average of cost-effectiveness).” Source: See Giving Season 2018 – Allocation (public), “Cost-effectiveness results” tab, row 17. Additional details at the link. 2. ↑ “We typically won’t move forward with a charity in our process if it appears that it won’t meet the threshold of at least 2-3x as cost-effective as cash transfers. We think cash transfers are a reasonable baseline to use due to the intuitive argument that if you’re going to help someone with Program X, Program X should be more cost-effective than just giving someone cash to buy that which they need most.” June 1, 2017, GiveWell blog, How GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses. The estimates presented here differ from the estimates presented in our recommendation to donors because they estimate weighted average cost-effectiveness over the whole funding gap, rather than on the margin. 3. ↑ We take into account an organization’s strength of communication with us and the comprehensiveness of its program monitoring. We factor this into our broad assessment of the organization’s cost-effectiveness. Read more: November 26, 2018, GiveWell blog, Our updated top charities for giving season 2018. function footnote_expand_reference_container() { jQuery("#footnote_references_container").show(); jQuery("#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button").text("-"); } function footnote_collapse_reference_container() { jQuery("#footnote_references_container").hide(); jQuery("#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button").text("+"); } function footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container() { if (jQuery("#footnote_references_container").is(":hidden")) { footnote_expand_reference_container(); } else { footnote_collapse_reference_container(); } } function footnote_moveToAnchor(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery("#" + p_str_TargetID); if(l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight/2 }, 1000); } }

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Catherine Hollander

Update on No Lean Season’s top charity status

5 years 4 months ago

At the end of 2017, we named Evidence Action’s No Lean Season one of GiveWell’s nine top charities. Now, GiveWell and Evidence Action agree that No Lean Season should not be a GiveWell top charity this year, and Evidence Action is not seeking additional funding to support its work at this time.

This post will discuss this decision in detail. In brief, we updated our assessment of No Lean Season, a program that provides loans to support seasonal migration, based on preliminary results Evidence Action began discussing with us in July from a study of the 2017 implementation of the program (hereinafter referred to as “2017 RCT”). These results suggested the program, as implemented in 2017, did not successfully induce migration. Taking this new information into account alongside previous studies of the program, we and Evidence Action do not believe No Lean Season meets our top charity criteria at this time.

Evidence Action’s post on this decision is here.

GiveWell’s mission is to identify and recommend charities that can most effectively use additional donations. While it may be disappointing for a top charity to be removed from our list of recommendations, we believe that adding and removing top charities from our list is an important part of our process. If our top charities list never changed, we would guess we were (a) acting too conservatively (i.e. not being open enough to adding new top charities), or (b) not being critical enough of groups once they’ve been added to our list (i.e. not being open enough to removing existing top charities).

We believe this decision speaks positively of Evidence Action and demonstrates our mutual commitment to updating our views based on new evidence. GiveWell has interacted with hundreds of organizations in our history, and very few have subjected their programs to a rigorous study in the way that Evidence Action did last year and, at smaller scale, in 2014. We’re excited to work with a group like Evidence Action that is committed to rigorous study and openness about results.

Summary

In this post, we will discuss:

  • The history of GiveWell and No Lean Season. (More)
  • How the 2017 RCT updated our views of No Lean Season. (More)
    • What did the 2017 RCT find? (More)
    • How did we interpret the RCT results? (More)
    • What does the future of No Lean Season look like? (More)
  • Conclusion
GiveWell and No Lean Season

No Lean Season provides support for low-income agricultural workers in rural Bangladesh during the time of seasonal income and food insecurity (“lean season”). The program provides small, interest-free loans to support workers’ temporary migration to seek employment. No Lean Season is implemented by RDRS Bangladesh; Evidence Action provides strategic direction, conducts program monitoring, and provides technical assistance, among other functions. Evidence Action developed No Lean Season as part of its Beta portfolio, which is focused on prototyping and scaling cost-effective programs.

GiveWell began engaging with No Lean Season as a potential top charity in 2013, when we began to explore making an Incubation Grant to support its scale-up. We saw No Lean Season as a promising program that lacked the track record to be considered for a top charity recommendation at that time. We describe our initial interest in the program in a February 2017 blog post:

We approached Evidence Action in late 2013 to express our interest in supporting the creation of new GiveWell top charities.

In March 2014, Good Ventures made a $250,000 grant to Evidence Action to support the investigation and scale-up of promising programs.

Since then, Good Ventures has made three additional grants totaling approximately $2.7 million to support the program’s scale-up.

No Lean Season continued to test and scale their program with this and other support. We decided to recommend No Lean Season as a top charity in late 2017. We based our recommendation on three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of the program. (We generally consider RCTs to be one of the strongest types of evidence available; you can read more about why we rely on RCTs here.)

Two of the RCTs (conducted in 2008 and 2014) indicated increased migration, income, and consumption for program participants. In the third RCT, which was conducted in 2013 and has not been published, the program is considered to have failed to induce migration, potentially due to political violence that year. We discuss the RCT evidence in greater depth in our intervention report on conditional subsidies for seasonal labor migration in northern Bangladesh.

Weighing the evidence, the cost of the program, and the potential impacts, we decided No Lean Season met our criteria to be named a top charity in November 2017. We summarized our reasoning in our blog post announcing our 2017 list of top charities, and noted the risks of this recommendation:

Several randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of subsidies to increase migration provide moderately strong evidence that such an intervention increases household income and consumption during the lean season. An additional RCT is ongoing. We estimate that No Lean Season is roughly five times as cost-effective as cash transfers (see our cost-effectiveness analysis).

Evidence Action has shared some details of its plans for monitoring No Lean Season in the future, but, as many of these plans have not been fully implemented, we have seen limited results. Therefore, there is some uncertainty as to whether No Lean Season will produce the data required to give us confidence that loans are appropriately targeted and reach their intended recipients in full; that recipients are not pressured into accepting loans; and that participants successfully migrate, find work, and are not exposed to major physical and other risks while migrating.

As indicated above, No Lean Season conducted an additional RCT to evaluate its program during the 2017 lean season (approximately September to December), the preliminary results of which indicate the program failed to induce migration. With the evidence from the 2017 RCT, the case for the program’s impact and cost-effectiveness looks weaker.

Our updated perspective on No Lean Season

The 2017 RCT was a key factor in the decision to remove No Lean Season from our top charities list. Below, we discuss:

What did the 2017 RCT find?

The 2017 RCT was a collaboration between Evidence Action, Innovations for Poverty Action, and researchers from Yale University, the London School of Economics, and the University of California, Davis. In a preliminary analysis shared with GiveWell in September 2018, the researchers did not find evidence for a negative or positive impact on migration, and found no statistically significant impact on income and consumption.[1]

However, the implementation of the program during the 2017[2] lean season and the evaluation of it differed from previous iterations. No Lean Season operated at a larger scale in the fall of 2017 than it had previously, offering loans to 158,155 households, compared with 16,268 households in 2016. Relative to earlier versions of the program, the program in 2017 involved (a) higher-intensity delivery of the intervention (offering loans to most eligible individuals) and (b) broader eligibility requirements (the eligibility rate in 2017 was 77 percent, compared with 49 percent in 2016).[3]

At this point, neither GiveWell, nor No Lean Season, nor the researchers feel we have a conclusive understanding of why the program failed to induce migration. However, No Lean Season and the researchers are exploring various hypotheses about what may explain the failure to induce migration, and they note that some suggestive evidence supports some hypotheses more than others. The researchers have posited several possibilities:

  1. The way the program was targeted in 2017 was suboptimal. The Migration Organizers, who survey households for eligibility and offer and disburse loans (more detail here under “Migration Organizers”), may have focused their efforts on the individuals that were seen as most likely to migrate, rather than those who needed a loan to afford migration. The use of loan targets during implementation may have inadvertently incentivized this behavior.[4] If, for example, loan officers mostly made loans to people who would have migrated regardless of receiving a loan, this could have led to the lack of impact on migration found in the study.
  2. The 2017 lean season was particularly bad for the program. The researchers note that severe flooding and associated implementation delays in some regions may have caused problems in 2017. The researchers plan to look more closely at the regions that experienced flooding, though they note that they don’t have the data necessary to make experimental comparisons.[5] In addition, a 2013 trial may have failed due to issues that were specific to the year of that trial, such as increased labor strikes.
  3. There exists another (currently unknown) reason why this program won’t work at scale. Conditions in Bangladesh may have changed, negative spillovers (harmful impacts for individuals who did not receive loans) may cancel out gains, or pilot villages may have been strategically picked in earlier trials.[6]

The researchers are considering all of these possibilities. After considering various possible theories as well as some non-experimental data (including administrative data and data from a special-purpose survey of Migration Organizers who worked on the program in 2017), they feel that the ‘mistargeting’ theory is the most likely explanation and the explanation most consistent with the analysis.[7]

In scenario (1), No Lean Season may be able to identify and fix the problem. In scenario (2), GiveWell will need to update our estimate of the impact of the program to take into account the fact that periodic program failures due to external factors are more likely than we previously thought. In scenario (3), the program is unlikely to be effective in the future.

How did we interpret the RCT results?

We don’t know the extent to which each of the above explanations contributed to the study not finding an effect on migration.

We used the results of the 2017 RCT to update our cost-effectiveness estimate for the program. Cost-effectiveness estimates form arguably the most important single input into our decisions about whether or not to recommend charities (more on how GiveWell uses cost-effectiveness analyses here). When we calculate a program’s cost-effectiveness, we take many different factors into account, such as the administrative and program costs and the expected impact. We also make a number of educated guesses, such as the likelihood that a program’s impact in a new country will be similar to that in a country where it has previously worked. Below, we describe the mechanism by which the 2017 RCT result was incorporated into our model and how it changed our conclusion.

Prior to this year, we formed our view of No Lean Season based on the three small-scale RCTs mentioned above (conducted in 2008, 2013, and 2014). Each of these RCTs looked at a slightly different version of the program. We believed that the ‘high-intensity’ arm of the 2014 RCT was the version most likely to resemble the program at scale. We thus used the migration rate measured in this arm of the RCT as our starting point for calculating the program’s impact.

The high-intensity arm of the 2014 RCT also had the highest measured migration rate of the three RCTs we assessed, and so we wanted to give some consideration to the less-positive results found in the other two assessments. We applied a small, downward adjustment to the rate of induced migration observed in the 2014 high-intensity arm in our cost-effectiveness model; this was an educated guess, based on the information we had. Our best guess was that the program would lead, in expectation, to 80% of the induced migration seen in the 2014 high-intensity arm.[8]

Now, the preliminary 2017 RCT results show no significant impact on migration rates or incomes. Because this trial was large and very recent, we updated our expectations of the impact of the program substantially, and in a negative direction. Our best guess now is that the program will lead, in expectation, to 40% of the induced migration seen in the 2014 high-intensity arm. Holding other inputs constant, this adjustment reduces our estimate of No Lean Season’s cost-effectiveness by a factor of two.

This reduced cost-effectiveness, along with our updated qualitative picture of No Lean Season’s evidence of effectiveness, led to the decision to remove No Lean Season from our top charities list.

What does the future of No Lean Season look like?

Although they are not raising more funding at this time, No Lean Season has over two years’ worth of remaining funding. We understand that the organization has made changes to the program design in 2018 based on emerging interpretations of the 2017 results, and has collected additional data to evaluate some of the hypotheses which may explain those results (including, for example, a survey of Migration Organizers who worked on the 2017 program). They plan to subject the 2018 implementation round to an additional ‘RCT-at-scale,’ with a particular focus on reassessing the program’s effects on migration, income and consumption, as well as potential effects at migration destinations. They will continue to explore what may have caused the issue in the 2017 program at scale, and to see whether they can find a solution. If they do that, we’ll want to reassess the evidence and the costs to determine whether No Lean Season meets our bar for top charity status. Evidence Action believes we should have the necessary information to reassess starting in mid-2019, based on the results of the RCT conducted during the 2018 lean season and other analyses they perform.

Conclusion

This is the second time since 2011 that we have removed a top charity from our list (prior to 2011, our top charities list was fairly different from today; we made a big-picture shift in our priorities that year that led us to our more recent lists). The previous removal occurred in 2013, when we took the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) off of our list because we didn’t believe it could absorb additional funding effectively in the near term. AMF was reinstated as a top charity in 2014.

The decision to remove a top charity is never easy. But continuously evaluating GiveWell’s recommended charities is an important part of our work, and we take it seriously. It’s easy to talk about a commitment to evidence when the results are positive. It’s hard to maintain that commitment when the results are not. We’re excited to work with a group like Evidence Action that is committed to rigorous program evaluation and open discussion of the results of those evaluations. Its openness about these results has increased our confidence in Evidence Action as an organization. We look forward to seeing the results from the 2018 RCT in 2019.

Notes

[1] “At this early stage in analysis, we find no evidence that the program had an impact (positive or negative) on migration, caloric intake, food expenditure, or income.” Evidence Action, unpublished summary document, Page 1.

[2] The 2017 RCT studied a period from the fall of 2017 through early 2018.

[3] “This study has two main goals:

  1. “A replication of previous findings showing positive impact of incentivized migration on seasonal migration, caloric intake, food and non-food expenditure, income, and food security. Our aim is to estimate impact of a scaled version of the No Lean Season program: intensifying program implementation within branches and expanding the provision of loans to all eligible households.”

Unpublished summary document, Page 1.

[4] “The second set of explanations focus on unintentional implementation changes caused by the change ineligibility, the vastly expanded scope of the program, or other factors. In the most recent round, it is possible that Migration Organizers (MOs) focused their efforts on those households who were most likely to migrate even without a loan to the exclusion of the target population households who need a loan to afford migration. Such behavior may have even been encouraged by the use of targets set by the NGO to manage implementation at such a large scale. We have implemented a qualitative survey to understand the incentives and actions of MOs last year, and are revising our instructions to avoid any possibility of this issue this year.” Evidence Action, unpublished summary document (with minor revision from Evidence Action), Page 11.

[5] “Most notably, the program was affected by severe flooding in many regions, and implementation was subsequently delayed as well. We are still evaluating whether these regions are the ones with the most diminished effects, although we lack the data in control areas to conduct an experimental comparison.” Evidence Action, unpublished summary document, Page 11-12.

[6] “It is possible that what we observe this year may be the true effect of the No Lean Season program when implemented at scale. This may be because conditions in rural Bangladesh have changed since the initial years of success, spillovers at scale cancel out any gains observed in small-scale pilots, or pilot villages were selected because they were most likely to be receptive to the program.” Evidence Action, unpublished summary document, Page 11.

[7] Evidence Action, “Interpretation of 2017 Results” deck and narrative (unpublished)

[8] “This adjustment is used to account for external validity concerns not accounted for elsewhere in the CEA.

“The default adjustment value of 80% is our best guess about the appropriate value, but it is not based on a formal calculation.

“The program at scale takes place in the same region with the same implementers (RDRS and Evidence Action) as the source of our key evidence for the intervention (the 2014 RCT). The program at scale differs in some aspects of implementation, particularly the inclusiveness of the eligibility criteria and the proportion of eligible households offered an incentive. In the 2014 RCT, the subsidy was a cash transfer rather than an interest-free loan, however the 2008 RCT found a similar effect regardless of whether the subsidy was a cash transfer or an interest-free loan.

“There is some evidence (from a 2013 RCT) suggesting that the program may be ineffective when the perceived risk of migrating increases for reasons such as labor strikes and violence. The researchers estimated that these are 1-in-10 year events.

“Additional discussion related to this parameter can be found at https://www.givewell.org/charities/no-lean-season#programdifferentfromRCTs.” 2018 GiveWell Cost-Effectiveness Model — Version 10, “Migration subsidies” tab, note on cell A19.

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Catherine Hollander

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q2 2018

5 years 7 months ago

In April to June 2018, we received $1.2 million in funding for making grants at our discretion. In addition, GiveWell’s Board of Directors voted to allocate $2.9 million in unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities. In this post we discuss:

  • The decision to allocate the $4.1 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) (70 percent) and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) (30 percent).
  • Our recommendation that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our discretion so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we continue to recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to AMF and 30 percent to SCI to maximize your impact.
  • Why we have allocated unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities.

Allocation of discretionary funds

The allocation of 70 percent of the funds to AMF and 30 percent to SCI follows the recommendation we have made, and continue to make, to donors. For more discussion on this allocation, see our blog post about allocating discretionary funds from the fourth quarter of 2017.

We ask each top charity to provide details of how they will use additional funding each year, as part of our process to update our “room for more funding” summary for each top charity. This year, we have asked for this information by the end of July. We also ask each of our top charities to let us know if they encounter unexpected funding gaps at other times of year. We have not learned of new funding gaps in the last quarter.

What is our recommendation to donors?

We continue to recommend that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our discretion so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we are continuing to recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to AMF and 30 percent to SCI to maximize your impact. The reasons for this recommendation are the same as in our Q4 2017 post on allocating discretionary funding.

We will complete a full analysis of our top charities’ funding gaps and cost-effectiveness by November and expect to update our recommendation to donors at that time.

Why we have allocated unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities

In June, GiveWell’s Board of Directors voted to allocate $2.9 million in unrestricted funds to making grants to recommended charities. We generally use unrestricted funds to support GiveWell’s operating costs. The decision was made to grant out some of the unrestricted funds we hold in accordance with two policies:

  • Our “excess assets” policy specifies that once we surpass a certain level of unrestricted assets, we grant out the excess rather than continue to hold it ourselves. We reviewed our unrestricted asset holdings and projected revenue and expenses for 2018-2020 and concluded that we held $1.8 million more than was required to give us a stable, predictable financial situation (details of how this rule is applied are at the previous link). The Board voted to irrevocably restrict this amount to making grants to recommended charities. Note that we continue to need ongoing donor support for our operations. This decision incorporates our projections for future donations.
  • In order to limit the risks of relying too heavily on any single source of revenue, we cap the amount of funding that we will use from one source to support our operating costs at 20% of our projected annual expenses. In early 2018, we received a donation of $2.1 million in unrestricted funds. Our operating expense budget for 2018 is $4.9 million. Therefore, the Board voted to retain $1.0 million to support operating costs in 2018 and irrevocably restrict $1.1 million to making grants to recommended charities.

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Natalie Crispin

Allocation of discretionary funds from Q1 2018

5 years 9 months ago

In the first quarter of 2018, we received $2.96 million in funding for making grants at our discretion. In this post we discuss:

  • The decision to allocate the $2.96 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) (70 percent) and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) (30 percent).
  • Our recommendation that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our discretion so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we continue to recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to AMF and 30 percent to SCI to maximize your impact.

Allocation of discretionary funds

The allocation of 70 percent of the funds to AMF and 30 percent to SCI follows the recommendation we have made, and continue to make, to donors. For more discussion on this allocation, see our blog post about allocating discretionary funds from the previous quarter.

We also considered the following possibilities for this quarter:

Helen Keller International (HKI) for stopgap funding in one additional country

We discussed this possibility in our blog post about allocating discretionary funds from the previous quarter. After further discussing this possibility with HKI, our understanding is that (a) the amount of funding needed to fill this gap will likely be small relative to the amount of GiveWell-directed funding that HKI currently holds, and (b) we will have limited additional information in time for this decision round that we could use to compare this new use of funding to HKI’s other planned uses of funding. We will continue discussing this opportunity with HKI and may allocate funding to it in the future. Our current expectation is that we will ask HKI to make the tradeoff between allocating the GiveWell-directed funding it holds to this new opportunity and continuing to hold the funds. Holding the funds gives the current programs more runway (originally designed to fund three years) and gives HKI more flexibility to fund highly cost-effective, unanticipated opportunities in the future. We believe that HKI is currently in a better position to assess cost-effectiveness of the opportunities it has than we are, while we will seek to maximize cost-effectiveness in the longer run by assessing HKI’s track record of cost-effectiveness and comparing that to the cost-effectiveness of other top charities.

We remain open to the possibility that HKI will share information with us that will lead us to conclude that this new opportunity is a better use of funds than our current recommendation of 70 percent to AMF and 30 percent to SCI. In that case, we would allocate funds from the next quarter to fill this funding gap (and could accelerate the timeline on that decision if it were helpful to HKI).

Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative for funding gaps in India and Nigeria

We spoke with Deworm the World about two new funding gaps it has due to unexpected costs in its existing programs in India and Nigeria.

In India, the cost overruns total $166,000. Deworm the World has the option of drawing down a reserve of $5.5 million (from funds donated on GiveWell’s recommendation). The reserve was intended to backstop funds that were expected but not fully confirmed from another funder. Given the small size of the gap relative to the available reserves, our preference is for Deworm the World to use that funding and for us to consider recommending further reserves as part of our end-of-year review of our top charities’ room for more funding.

In Nigeria, there is a funding gap of $1.7 million in the states that Deworm the World is currently operating in. Previous budgets assumed annual treatment for all children, and Deworm the World has since become aware of the existence of areas where worm prevalence is high enough that twice per year treatment is recommended. Our best guess is that AMF and SCI are more cost-effective than Deworm the World’s Nigeria program (see discussion in this post). It is possible that because additional funding would go to support additional treatments in states where programs already operate, the cost to deliver these marginal treatments would be lower. We don’t currently have enough data to analyze whether that would significantly change the cost-effectiveness in this case.

Deworm the World also continues to have a funding gap for expansion to other states in Nigeria. We wrote about this opportunity in our previous post on allocating discretionary funding.

Malaria Consortium for seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC)

We continue to see a case for directing additional funding to Malaria Consortium for SMC, as we did last quarter. Our views on this program have not changed. For further discussion, see our previous post on allocating discretionary funding.

What is our recommendation to donors?

We continue to recommend that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our discretion so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we are continuing to recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to AMF and 30 percent to SCI to maximize your impact. The reasons for this recommendation are the same as in our previous post on allocating discretionary funding.

The post Allocation of discretionary funds from Q1 2018 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Natalie Crispin
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50 minutes 17 seconds ago
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