Children Without Worms

Published: August 2015

About this page

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

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

Process

In early 2015, we asked Children Without Worms (www.childrenwithoutworms.org) to apply for consideration as a top charity because, as we wrote on our blog, we were looking for additional organizations that could use funding to scale-up priority programs (programs that we believe have strong evidence of cost-effectiveness). Children Without Worms (CWW) works on deworming programs, which we consider to be a priority program.

We spoke with representatives of CWW in March 2015. We learned that CWW would use additional funding primarily to pursue activities it had not pursued in the past.1 This work would include facilitating coalitions and advocating for improved monitoring and evaluation among groups involved in deworming and other neglected tropical disease programs.2

Because CWW did not have a significant history of successfully working on these activities, we did not believe we would be able to assess its impact on deworming programs well enough to recommend it as a top charity, so we did not pursue our investigation further.

Sources

Document Source
GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Children Without Worms, March 18, 2015 Source
  • 1

    GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Children Without Worms, March 18, 2015

    • "If it had funding from a new source, CWW would likely apply it in 2 areas:
      1. Resident technical advisers to catalyze programs in priority countries
      2. Fostering national-level coalitions to leverage resources for comprehensive program coverage" (Pg 4)
    • "CWW does not currently have any resident technical advisers in the field – this is a forward-looking goal for what it might do with more funding." (Pg 5)

  • 2

    GiveWell's non-verbatim summary of a conversation with Children Without Worms, March 18, 2015

    • "The technical advisor would involve facilitating program expansion and helping health ministries to coordinate between different players, rather than directly carrying out deworming like SCI does, or displacing other existing organizations." (Pg 4)
    • "However, monitoring and evaluation are often not budgeted into programs, so very little is being done. CWW could provide assistance so that more monitoring and evaluation could be carried out." (Pg 5)