[1] Although we have thoroughly analyzed our top charity programs, it is important to note that we still have open questions and uncertainties in our analysis, as with all of the programs that we have investigated. We’ve written about our approach to cost-effectiveness analysis and its limitations here.
[2] We began recommending GiveWell Incubation Grants in 2014, with the goal of seeding programs that would eventually become new top charities. (We retired the "incubation grant" designation in May 2022 because developing new top charities is no longer the only goal of our non-top charity grants.) An early grant we recommended in this category was $100,000 to New Incentives for general operating support; after directing several further grants to New Incentives, we named it a top charity in November 2020.
[3] See our 2021 metrics report, p. 6, "2021 Funds directed by category" chart. $190 million in non-top charity grants / $518 million in overall grant spending = ~37%.
Based on the number of opportunities we're currently investigating, we expect the proportion of our non-top charity grant spending in 2022 to be closer to 25%. Based on this projection, and depending on the popularity of this giving option among donors, it is likely that the All Grants Fund will support top charity programs.
[4] This is a preliminary estimate. We plan to publish more information about our cost-effectiveness analysis when we publish a page about this grant.
[5] Our current best guess is that negative or positive spillover effects of GiveDirectly's cash transfer program are minimal on net, but this estimate is uncertain. We wrote about our view of spillover effects here in 2018, and the full results from a more recent study of GiveDirectly’s program are now available here. We have not yet reviewed in detail the results of the study, but intuitively we think the difference could be on the order of 2x—i.e., it is unlikely updates to our model from this investigation would be large enough to change our marginal recommendations to donors given our current cost-effectiveness bar. You can find our calculations on GiveDirectly’s cost-effectiveness here.
Additionally, in June 2021, we made a grant of $121,626 to Oxford University to support research evaluating spillover effects from a variant of GiveDirectly's cash transfer program in Kenya. We are considering support for additional research projects on this subject.
[6] "In 2020, [global] malaria deaths increased by 12% compared with 2019, to an estimated 627 000." WHO, World Malaria Report 2021, p. xvi
[7] This is a rough estimate. We calculate $3,500 as the 2021 average cost per life saved through Helen Keller International's vitamin A supplementation program, using donations from Open Philanthropy and the Maximum Impact Fund. More information here.