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We’re crossposting the first part of a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives aims to increase vaccination coverage in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers.

We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. However, we hope that this post, about New Incentives’ efforts to reach zero-dose children, can provide another angle for understanding the efforts of our Top Charities.

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The post Finding and Vaccinating More Children appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Planning a wedding is stressful. Questions around who to invite, what to eat, where to take pictures, what kind of music to play—the list goes on and on. But when Lucie and Geoff started planning their big day, at least one element was a no-brainer.

A fundraiser for GiveWell would serve as their wedding registry.

“I think we were pretty aligned since the beginning that we didn't want to get gifts,” says Lucie. With successful careers and after living together for several years, the couple didn’t feel the need for a traditional wedding registry with household items. Offering a fundraiser instead allowed guests to contribute whatever felt reasonable to them, avoiding the social and financial pressures of buying a registry item.

Lucie and Geoff’s wedding was held in the Czech Republic with a blend of Czech and American guests, and the two cultures celebrate weddings differently—weddings in the US often involve gifts for the couple, while wedding guests in the Czech Republic often bring envelopes of cash instead. “It just seemed better for everyone to have a unified outlet.”

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The post Including GiveWell on Your Wedding Registry appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!

If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.

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The post September 2024 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

If there’s one group of people who are as obsessed as we are with rigorously analyzing a complicated domain and figuring out where to prioritize scarce resources, it’s Major League Baseball front offices. With that in mind, we wanted to write this guide comparing some baseball statistics with the metrics we take into consideration when evaluating programs to save and improve lives.

Batting Average: Batting average is simple to calculate and easy to explain, and it was historically considered one of the most important ways of evaluating how good a player was. It remains one of the primary baseball stats you'll find in the newspaper.

But as a measure of a player’s value, batting average isn’t actually all that helpful—and at times can be actively misleading. One of the two primary shortcomings of batting average is that it ignores plate appearances that end in a walk. But walks are really valuable! The Little League wisdom that “a walk is as good as a hit” is an oversimplification, but it also points us toward a statistic that's more valuable than batting average. It turns out that on-base percentage, which considers walks (as well as the less common hit-by-pitch method of reaching base) as a successful outcome, is a better predictor of a player’s offensive value.

As an example, Juan Pierre and Adam Dunn, who both played in about 2,000 games over their careers, had lifetime batting averages of .295 and .237 respectively. At first glance this might give the impression that Pierre was the more productive hitter. Looking at on-base percentage though, we see that Dunn actually reached base more frequently than Pierre (.364 versus .343), which, combined with his propensity for hitting home runs (another indicator of offensive value that batting average ignores), made him the much more valuable career hitter. (Dunn’s negative defensive contributions are another story.)

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The post GiveWell as Moneyball appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell started supporting vaccines in 2015 and has made over $160 million in grants to date. With strong results from past work in this space, we're now exploring how to reach more people with vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. This post discusses our current thinking on vaccines grantmaking and our key hypotheses about where to focus our efforts going forward.

Before this year, our grants for vaccine programs focused on (a) increasing uptake of the vaccines given to children in the first two years of life, and (b) speeding up the rollout of malaria vaccines.

Relative to other global health approaches, vaccines garner a lot of attention. Governments in high-income countries contribute to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which heavily subsidizes the purchasing of vaccines in the world’s poorest countries and provides cash assistance to help these countries deliver them. The Gates Foundation is also a major contributor to vaccine programs. These efforts have been fairly successful—in 2022, 81% of children in the 57 low-income countries supported by Gavi had received the DTP3 vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. DTP3 coverage is often used as a benchmark for progress on vaccination.

This provides both a challenge and an opportunity for finding cost-effective giving opportunities. On the one hand, thankfully, the people who are easiest to reach with vaccines are already being reached, which means more expensive or innovative methods are needed to expand coverage. On the other hand, we can build on the extensive knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.

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The post Research Strategy: Vaccines appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

You can view previous open threads here.

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The post September 2024 Open Thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!

If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.

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The post August 2024 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Sometimes statistics can help when it's hard to decide what to do.

You’re at a local art fair, and they’re raffling off a car worth $10,000. Five hundred tickets are being sold, each for $10. Does it make financial sense to buy a ticket? (For the moment, let’s set aside other questions about raffles and just focus on the benefit for you, the potential ticket-buyer.)

You can use a statistical concept called “expected value” to help you decide. Expected value is calculated by multiplying the probability of each potential outcome by its value, then adding these results together to get the average result of an action.

Let's figure this out—a car is on the line. First, we multiply the probability of each potential outcome by its value.

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The post Raffles, Deworming, and Statistics appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

It started in my early forties, and it's only gotten worse since then. At first, it was a mild annoyance, but now it affects my quality of life and makes it harder to get things done. I'm definitely not alone—almost every middle-aged person I know has the same problem—and maybe you do too: a condition called presbyopia, a type of age-related vision loss that makes it difficult to see things clearly at close distances.

Luckily, the condition is easily and inexpensively treated with reading glasses, widely available at nearly every corner drug store in the United States. Reading glasses work well, and they're cheap enough that I have them stashed around my house so a pair is always in reach. But an estimated 510 to 826 million people around the world have presbyopia but do not have corrective glasses.

We think that providing reading glasses to people who need them is a promising way to improve their employment opportunities and increase their economic well-being. It makes intuitive sense that being able to see better would improve people's ability to work, particularly for vision-intensive jobs such as crop cultivation and inspection, manufacturing, or retail work.

Since we're not as confident as we'd like to be in the effect of distributing reading glasses, we're co-funding a study to find out more before we allocate significant funding to direct delivery of glasses. We're recommending a $4.8 million grant for the study.

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The post Bringing the Economic Benefits of Reading Glasses into Focus appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

What do you do if you’re in the very fortunate position of having more money than you need to meet your own immediate needs? You might find new things to buy. You might stockpile it for a rainy day. You might donate it to cost-effective global health programs. Or you might do some combination of the three.

GiveWell thinks about that same question.

First, a bit of context: All donations made to GiveWell's Top Charities Fund, All Grants Fund, and recommended organizations go to the programs we recommend. (We do not take a percentage of donations made to recommended organizations through GiveWell’s website, nor do we receive any fees from organizations for being featured on our site.)

Our own organizational needs are met by donors who choose to direct funding to GiveWell’s operations (by giving to our Unrestricted Fund). In other words, we are supported only by donors who explicitly choose to support GiveWell itself through unrestricted donations.

But what happens when we receive more unrestricted donations than we need? We could choose to spend the funds on something new for the organization. We could squirrel those funds away, building an endowment to cover future needs. Or, like you, we could donate to cost-effective global health programs.

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The post What If We Have Extra? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

What does it take to prevent malaria? Some of the programs GiveWell recommends might sound straightforward—for example, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) programs provide antimalarial drugs to young children—but the process of accomplishing this is not simple at all.

Below, we offer a post from Malaria Consortium that describes the many complex steps required to carry out an SMC campaign. See our reports for more information about the evidence for SMC and about Malaria Consortium's SMC program.

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The post More than a Spoonful of Medicine appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Today we’re sharing a few quotes from pieces we’ve come across recently in our work—claims have not been vetted, and (of course) interest is not endorsement.

• “The story of Ethiopian manufacturing—its rise, its faltering, and its potential for renewal—is an example, I believe, of where a little more empathy can lead to better economics.” (Oliver Kim, Global Developments)
• “Every year, tuberculosis kills over a million people. Can a new vaccine turn the tide? For the last 100 years, we’ve only had one TB vaccine—and it leaves a lot to be desired.” (Jess Craig, Future Perfect)

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The post Some Things We’re Reading appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’re crossposting a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives promotes vaccination in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers. Recently, one of New Incentives' field officers wrote about his experience collecting program data.

GiveWell asks all of our Top Charities to share detailed monitoring information, which we review to assess the quality of program implementation and the number of children reached. We also use this data as part of our cost-effectiveness analyses, which are the basis of our funding decisions.

We're sharing this post to provide a firsthand account of how that monitoring data is collected. We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. Still, we hope Sanusi’s experience opens one small window into the efforts our Top Charities take to ensure high-quality implementation.

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The post 100 Miles of Monitoring appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Water is a relatively new area of grantmaking for GiveWell, but we’re excited about its potential. Two billion people around the world lack access to clean drinking water, and unclean water is a major cause of illness and death, primarily through waterborne diseases such as diarrhea and cholera.

Within the water portfolio, we think about which specific programs in which specific places are likely to address these health burdens most cost-effectively, and what additional evidence we need to gather in order to make that determination.

In this blog post, we detail our current approach to our water portfolio, explore the areas we're excited to investigate next, and share the work we're doing this year to deepen our understanding of the sector. Through this work, we aim to make more highly cost-effective grants that bring clean water to many more people around the world.

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The post Research Strategy: Water appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

How do GiveWell's funding decisions influence the actions of governments, funders, and other organizations? Answering this question is an important part of figuring out which global health programs are most cost-effective and thus which we should support. We've already written about two key factors in our cost-effectiveness estimates: the cost per person reached and the overall burden. But those are only part of the equation.

We also consider what others are likely to do in response to our choices. For example, does our funding displace money the local government had planned to allocate to the program? Or would our funding make other funders more excited to join us in making sure the program is implemented?

Wedding registries provide a loose analogy about how one person's decision might influence another's: If someone already bought the toaster on the list, you're probably not going to buy the lucky couple another one. The money that great-aunt Sally spent on the toaster has displaced the funding you had planned to allocate to the toaster: this is what we call “fungibility.”

In contrast, if the spouses-to-be have signed up for flatware service for 12 and only 6 settings have been purchased, you might prioritize filling out the remainder of the set, to be sure that the couple doesn't run out of spoons at their upcoming dinner parties. In that case, the guests who purchased the first 6 settings can "crowd in" funding from other guests: this is what we call "leverage."

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The post The fungibility question: How does GiveWell’s funding affect other funders? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

The idea has obvious intuitive appeal: If you’re already sending community healthcare workers door-to-door in (say) remote parts of Sierra Leone to deliver routine childhood vaccines, why not have those healthcare workers deliver chlorine for disinfecting drinking water, or oral rehydration solution for treating dehydration from diarrhea?

After all, if you’re already spending money on the fixed costs of delivery, why not provide other programs at the same time? You'd be able to amortize the costs across multiple goods and offer additional benefits to the community. (If you’re getting groceries delivered, it’s more efficient to have one driver deliver your eggs and milk and vegetables all together than to have separate drivers going round delivering each one separately.)

GiveWell is very interested in these "layered interventions," and we are excited to support them wherever they cross our cost-effectiveness threshold. But we've discovered it’s harder than you might think to find ways to combine programs effectively.

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The post Increasing impact by combining programs appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Our research team spends over 50,000 hours a year looking for cost-effective organizations and interventions to save and improve lives, with the goal of producing the world's top research on where to give. This interview with Program Officer Erin Crossett provides a glimpse into the world of GiveWell research.

Q: What made you interested in joining the GiveWell research team?

A: I really cared about working at a place where evidence of real impact was the key determinant of what we investigated and what we funded. I think a lot of organizations nominally care about impact, and the term “impact” gets thrown around a lot. But I think it really means something at GiveWell—it’s a core part of the GiveWell research DNA, and that’s very motivating.

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The post Researcher Spotlight: Erin Crossett, GiveWell Program Officer appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

May marked my three-year anniversary as a Philanthropy Advisor at GiveWell. It’s a job I adore (as I’ve written about here and here), and I’ve recently been tasked with the exciting process of interviewing candidates for our growing team.

One of the best questions I’ve been asked in this process is: What’s the hardest part about fundraising for GiveWell? The short answer: GiveWell is funding constrained, but we can't point at a specific opportunity and say, "If you donate now, here's the impact your donation will actually cause.”

Instead, our answer is fairly abstract, and pretty far from traditional fundraising language. We tell donors that we would spend additional money on opportunities at or above our cost-effectiveness bar (which translates to saving a life for about $5,000), but we’re unable to explain in advance precisely what we will allocate additional funds to. That answer isn’t as compelling as telling someone a vivid story about how their money alone would allow us to fund a great program we’ll otherwise have to decline, but it has the advantage of being completely accurate and true.

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The post The hardest part about fundraising for GiveWell appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.

You can view previous open threads here.

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The post June 2024 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!

If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.

Read More

The post May 2024 updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.