Note: This page summarizes the rationale behind a GiveWell grant to the University of Warwick. University of Warwick staff reviewed this page prior to publication.
In a nutshell
In April 2024, GiveWell recommended a $13,580 grant to the University of Warwick. This grant will allow Associate Professor Mattie Toma, head of the Policymakers Lab, to spend time recruiting policymakers from low income countries (LICs) to participate in the lab’s surveys.
We are recommending this grant because one priority for GiveWell’s research team is to get better feedback on our work, including from policymakers in the countries we fund programs in. If Professor Toma is successful in her recruitment, we may be able to use her sample to ask policymakers from LICs questions relevant to GiveWell’s work (more).
Published: May 2025
Background
The Policymakers Lab is a research group hosted by Mattie Toma at the University of Warwick (Warwick Business School, Behavioral Science Group). It aims to draw on policymakers' perspectives across a range of issues. To date, the lab has mostly focused on questions such as:
- How can we effectively communicate research evidence to policymakers?
- What types of academic research are policymakers most interested in?
It does this by maintaining a pool of public servants and politicians from around the world who are willing to complete surveys sharing their perspectives.1 The lab currently consists of policymakers, primarily from high- and middle-income countries, who participate in short (<15-minute) online surveys.2
The grant
We are recommending a grant of $13,580 to the University of Warwick to buy out 15% of Professor Mattie Toma’s time over four months.3 Professor Toma has told us that this time otherwise would have been spent teaching and doing research in her capacity as Associate Professor and will instead be spent recruiting policymakers from LICs to the Policymakers Lab.
Professor Toma plans to recruit the policymakers by reaching out to country offices of research organizations, her network in academia, GiveWell’s network (including our Research Council), and the ODI Fellowship Scheme network. She may also do in-person recruitment.4
If Professor Toma is successful, GiveWell could use the lab’s platform to ask policymakers questions relevant to our research. We asked Professor Toma about what questions would and would not be suitable to ask via the platform and received positive indications that we would be able to a) use the platform to ask questions relevant to our work, provided we got ethics approval beforehand, and b) experiment with different ways to solicit feedback (e.g. using the platform to source in-depth interviews as opposed to just running online surveys).5 We discuss some of the questions we might want to ask below.
The case for the grant
We are recommending this grant primarily because one of GiveWell’s priorities is to get more external feedback on our grantmaking. One of the groups that we’re interested in getting more feedback from is policymakers in countries where we fund programs.
If Professor Toma is able to successfully recruit policymakers from LICs, we would be able to ask them about areas that could inform our work. For example:
- One critique we sometimes hear is that GiveWell focuses too much on vertical NGO-led health programming rather than systems strengthening work. We would like to dig more into this, and one way we might do so is by asking policymakers in LICs about their perspective on the relative merits of both styles of programming.
- GiveWell’s grant decisions rely on us making difficult tradeoffs between key outcomes modeled in our cost-effectiveness analyses, such as consumption gains vs. reduced mortality risk. These trade-offs are captured in our moral weights. We have previously asked GiveWell staff, GiveWell donors, and people living in rural areas in LICs how they trade-off between these outcomes. Policymakers in LICs seem like another relevant constituency to consult about these trade-offs.
We also think adding policymakers from LICs to the sample could be a public good, as other researchers might be able to use the sample to further their own research questions.
Reservations
Our primary reservations about the grant are:
- It’s possible that policymakers from LICs may not be interested in joining the Policymakers Lab, or that it may be harder to recruit, if email is less frequently used. Professor Toma plans to experiment with a range of recruitment strategies (e.g. cold email, warm introductions, in-person visits) to see which seems most promising.
- Even if we can recruit people, it’s possible that policymakers from LICs may be less responsive to online surveys compared to policymakers in HICs. For this reason, we may experiment with different methods of data collection once people have joined the lab, such as Zoom or in-person interviews. Professor Toma has agreed to this in principle, provided we get ethics approval from an IRB board.6
- All surveys/interviews run through the lab will require ethics approval. While we understand the reasons for this, this limits the type of questions we could ask the sample. For example, we likely couldn’t use the Policymakers Lab to send rapid questions to a policymaker in a country where we are investigating a time-sensitive grant.
- We think it’s possible another funder would have made this grant. Open Philanthropy made a grant for operational support to the Policymakers Lab in 2024, and told us there was a 75% chance they would have made this grant had they been sent this proposal.7 We’re not very concerned about funging reducing the counterfactual impact of this grant because we think the funds that Open Philanthropy might have spent on this grant will likely be spent on other cost-effective grants.
Plans for follow up
Throughout the year, we’ll check in with Professor Toma to see how recruitment is going. If it goes well, we will likely try to run a survey of LIC policy makers through the platform, though we haven’t yet decided what questions we’d want to ask.
We may also consider funding a follow-up grant to Professor Toma. The main metrics we will use to make this decision are:
- How many policymakers from LICs they are able to recruit.
- Response rates of these policymakers, if we run a survey or research project through the platform.
Forecasts
| Confidence | Prediction | By time | Resolution |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60% | Mattie recruits 10+ LMIC policymakers to the Policymakers Lab | August 2025 | - |
| 40% | Mattie recruits 20+ LMIC policymakers to the Policymakers Lab | August 2025 | - |
| 20% | Mattie recruits 30+ LMIC policymakers to the Policymakers Lab | August 2025 | - |
Our process
We conducted a relatively minimal investigation of this opportunity. We spoke with Professor Toma, Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan at Open Philanthropy, and Lee Crawfurd at the Center of Global Development about the opportunity. Lee Crawfurd was a co-author of a similar project which sought to elicit LIC policymaker perspectives about questions related to education.8
Sources
- 1
“The Policymakers Lab comprises public servants and politicians from around the world interested in lending their expertise to contribute to and inform academic research. Policymakers in the Lab will receive invitations to complete online surveys, with opportunities for additional engagement. Policymakers in the Lab represent 13 countries across 4 continents, and counting!
Research drawing on insights from policymakers can shed light on the priorities and perspectives of those in important roles for society. Types of questions the Lab can address include:
- How can we effectively communicate research evidence to policymakers?
- What types of academic research are policymakers most interested in?
- 2
- The current list of participants include policymakers and civil servants from the USA, UK, Australia, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Canada, France, New Zealand, Belgium, Thailand, and Chile. The USA, UK, and Australia are the most represented countries.
- Professor Mattie Toma, Comments on a review of this page, 5/7/2025 (unpublished).
- 3
“The Policymakers Lab is hosted by Mattie Toma at the University of Warwick.” University of Warwick, “Policymakers Lab”
- 4
- If Professor Toma were to travel to recruit policymakers from LICs, this activity would be covered by preexisting funding sources, rather than the grant at hand.
- Professor Mattie Toma, email to GiveWell, February 12, 2025 (not published)
- 5
Professor Mattie Toma, email to GiveWell, March 20, 2025 (not published)
- 6
Professor Mattie Toma, email to GiveWell, March 20, 2025 (not published)
- 7
Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan, Open Philanthropy, email to GiveWell, February 14, 2025 (not published)
- 8
“Foreign aid donors and international organizations supporting education in developing countries
have increasingly coalesced around a policy agenda… We survey over 900 senior government officials working on education in 35 low- and middle-income countries to gauge their alignment with this agenda.” Crawfurd et al. 2021, Abstract.