Aggregator

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).
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] });

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.

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).
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] });

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.

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 our December 2018 open thread here.

The post March 2019 open thread 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 our December 2018 open thread here.

The post March 2019 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We (GiveWell) recently announced that we’re planning to expand the scope of our research and to roughly double the size of our full-time research staff (from approximately 10 to 20) over the next three years. I (James) am writing this post because I think GiveWell is an awesome place to work and I think now is a particularly good time to join.

I’ll start by telling the story of how I started working with GiveWell’s research team. Then I’ll explain why I think it’s a great place to work and how you can decide if you’d like to work here. Finally, I’ll add some notes on what the application process looks like, and how much time it’s likely to take if you reach the later stages.

If there’s anything you want to learn about that I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to get back to you.

I should acknowledge that I was asked to write this post because I like my job a lot. I hope you’re willing to put this publication bias to one side for a few minutes.

My career before GiveWell

I started my career in consulting. It was OK, but I couldn’t shake the feelings that (a) I wasn’t doing anything useful, and (b) the research we did wasn’t always motivated by needing to get to the right answer. So after a few years I took an early career break, and went to do a master’s degree (in philosophy and economics). This was when I got really interested in figuring out where I should give money in order to most effectively help people.

I thought about applying to GiveWell during my master’s degree, but decided not to because my partner and I both lived and worked in London, and GiveWell is based in San Francisco. With hindsight, this was probably a mistake. I’ve done work remotely for GiveWell for the last two years, and—even though remote work does come with its challenges—it’s turned out just fine. Two years later, GiveWell applied for a visa for me, and I will join the staff this spring.

But back then, instead of applying to GiveWell, I joined the research team at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). Here, I realized that working out which charities help people the most was a question of incredible importance, depth and difficulty. I decided that I’d like to spend a good chunk of my life trying to answer it better.

As part of CEA’s research into cost-effective giving opportunities, I’d started looking into preventing pesticide suicide as a potential high impact area for philanthropy. However, before I’d completed my investigation, CEA decided to discontinue its philanthropic research activities. Fortunately, my manager sent my preliminary work to GiveWell, who interviewed me, asked me to do a work trial (20 hours, paid) and then offered me a position as a research consultant. Five months later, GiveWell made a grant of $1.3 million to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention as a direct result of my research. That felt great.

Why do I think GiveWell’s a great place to work?

When I was considering whether to join GiveWell, my main questions were:

1. How much does this job help people? (more)
2. Is the work intellectually stimulating? (more)
3. Is the work something I’m likely to be good at? (more)
4. Will I be working with people who are excellent at what they do, share my values, and are nice to be around? (more)
5. Will I be able to work remotely? (more)

I’ll go through each of these questions in turn.

You can help people a lot by working at GiveWell.

When you’re working as a philanthropic funder, your impact is a function of (i) how much funding you influence, and (ii) how much you can improve the allocation of that funding.

GiveWell influences a lot of funding. In 2017, we influenced between $133 million and $150 million.1$133 million includes (i) donations to our top charities through GiveWell, (ii) donations directly to our top charities where donors explicitly indicated their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation, and (iii) Incubation Grants funded by Good Ventures. $150 million includes our best guess of donations which were a result of our recommendations but for which donors did not explicitly indicate their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation. 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] });

We have 25 staff between the research, operations, and outreach teams, meaning that, on average each staff member influences ~$5-6 million each year. That’s more than individual staff influence at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world.2The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made $4.7 billion in grants in 2017, with 1,541 employees = ~$3 million per employee. 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 also have a lot of control over how those funds are granted, subject to being able to clearly explain the rationale for those grants to our colleagues and donors who rely on our research.

Taking the conservative estimate of the portion of that funding that went to our top charities (as opposed to Incubation Grants) we estimate that, in expectation, this $117 million prevented 19,000 deaths, administered 50 million deworming treatments, and gave cash to 8,300 poor households.

So how much have I personally influenced that funding?

I’ve been the lead investigator on three grants: a $1.3 million grant to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention, a $1 million grant to J-PAL’s Innovation in Government Initiative, and a $300,000 grant to Fortify Health. The first two of these grants likely would not have happened without my work.

I led the discussion of how to allocate $64 million of funding from Good Ventures in 2018 by developing principles for making this decision.

I’ve contributed to methodological improvements in our cost-effectiveness analysis, completed internal evidence reviews of tens of different programs, reviewed new research relevant to our top charities, and managed other researchers.

Today, I’m leading our research into new types of interventions that fall outside of our traditional top charity criteria, and am exploring opportunities to help aid agencies spend their money more cost-effectively. I think that both of these projects have the potential to massively increase GiveWell’s impact. They’re still at a very early stage, and we want to devote more capacity to them longer term, so I see this as an enormous opportunity for new people at GiveWell to help shape the organization’s future research agenda.

I don’t think this kind of impact is unusual for a GiveWell researcher. If you do well here, you’ll be given the opportunity to take direct ownership over a lot of your work, taking the lead on important decisions (with input from your manager and the rest of the team).

Without a detailed cost-effectiveness analysis, I can’t confidently state that GiveWell is the single most impactful place you could possibly work. But if you think improving the lives of people living in extreme poverty is of the utmost importance, I think it’s near the top.

The work is intellectually stimulating.

GiveWell’s work starts with the question, where should our donors give their money to maximize their impact on people living in the poorest parts of the world? We break this question down into its constituent parts, and answer each part to the best of our abilities.

For example, I’m currently looking into whether the effective regulation of lead paint might be a cost-effective way to improve childhood development outcomes.3This project is still in progress and hasn’t yet been published on our website. 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] }); This project involves:

1. Critically reviewing the academic literature on the links between (i) exposure to lead-based paint and high blood lead levels, (ii) high blood lead levels and cognitive function, and (iii) cognitive function and earnings.
2. Estimating the proportion of houses in low-income countries which are currently painted by using Google Maps random street view, and estimating the proportion of paint that contains lead by using paint studies.
3. Interviewing academic experts about the impact of lead on childhood development.
4. Interviewing implementers and doing online research to understand which organizations work on lead paint regulation, how much funding they currently receive, and how much an advocacy campaign costs.
5. Critically reviewing case studies of past campaigns to understand the factors that lead to successful regulation and enforcement.
6. Building a rough cost-effectiveness model using all of the above information.
7. Explaining and justifying my conclusions privately to the GiveWell team, and publicly to donors who rely on our work.

This work isn’t just taking the headline results of some studies and plugging them into a spreadsheet. It requires thinking carefully and critically about how to interpret the entirety of the evidence available to us. What sources of bias or variance exist; how should they affect our best guess of what is actually true? And, ultimately, what should we do?

How do I know if this is right for me?

You won’t know until you try it, and I’d recommend applying to be a GiveWell researcher even if you’re unsure. Our current recruiting process includes a 20-hour paid work trial for candidates in the later stages of the process, which is a great opportunity for both sides to work out if it’s a good fit. But I can offer some pointers about what might indicate you’ll like the work:

1. You should enjoy and be competent at understanding academic evidence. You don’t have to have a PhD (unless you’re applying for the Senior Fellow position), but you should understand, or be able to quickly learn, what to look for in a study in order to interpret its results and assess its merits.
2. You should be excited by broad, thorny questions with no obvious answers. Most of the important questions in the world haven’t been answered decisively by rigorous academic studies.
3. You should enjoy making clear arguments and critically assessing the arguments of others.
4. You should prefer working quickly (relative to academia) to get the best answer you can to guide your decisions, rather than spending lots of time diving deep on a narrow question that isn’t going to change your decision.
5. You should be OK with most of the work being desk-based. I’ve attended workshops and built relationships by traveling to meet people when they’ve been important for achieving our objectives, but we’re not interested in publicity or relationships for their own sake. The majority of research work involves reading and writing at your computer.

You don’t have to have all of these interests to succeed at GiveWell. I’m medium on 1 and 5, but close to maximum on 2, 3, and 4.

Another way to work out if you might enjoy the work is to read this post by Rachel Glennerster comparing academic and policy jobs.

If your reaction is these both sound great but policy jobs sound better, that’s a good sign. GiveWell researchers are more academically-minded and technical than typical grantmakers, but the work here is still closer to a policy job than an academic one. It’s this combination of academic rigor and practical recommendations that makes the job quite unique.

Will I be working with people who are excellent at what they do, share my values, and are nice to be around?

The people at GiveWell are among the most competent, kind and thoughtful people I’ve ever worked with. Some specific things I’ve observed about working at GiveWell:

• Managers put a lot of effort into helping their reports improve. The management philosophy generally focuses on making the most of your strengths, ahead of mitigating your weaknesses. Managers also share feedback frequently to stay in sync with reports on how things are going.
• Managers are very open to receiving feedback. During the first year I worked with GiveWell, I was constantly being asked what I disliked about my work. My disappointingly positive responses soon necessitated a switch to the un-dodgeable, “What’s the worst thing about working with GiveWell?”
• Staff at GiveWell are remarkably conscious of other people’s feelings. I’ve seen plenty of disagreement, but when I’ve disagreed with my colleagues, I’ve generally felt like we’re all on the same side trying to get to a better answer.
• Staff are very passionate about their work and take their jobs seriously, but GiveWell is flexible with working hours. We’re encouraged to work the hours in which we’re most productive, or fit our working hours around family commitments. Staff rarely feel pressure to work late into the evening, although they sometimes choose to do so.

Is it hard to work remotely?

Because I consult remotely from the UK, I don’t see as much of my colleagues as I’d like. A lot of people have asked me what it’s like working remotely and whether I have any tips. I do:

• If you’re going to work remotely, I’d recommend spending a few weeks in California as soon as possible (GiveWell is happy to pay for remote staff to visit four times a year). Remote meetings feel a lot better when you’ve met the person on the other side of the screen in person before.
• Make the most of the time you have for communication. The time difference between California and the UK has been a bigger issue for me than not being in the same location because I only have a few hours of overlap with most of GiveWell’s staff each day. There’s not really an easy solution to this, but it’s manageable if you’re efficient with that time.
• Consider relocating if you can. GiveWell is open to staff working remotely on a long-term basis (just under half of our researchers currently work remotely). This works fine when you’re largely doing independent research, but it’s harder when you’re managing people. GiveWell sponsors international visas, although these can take a long time to obtain.

How can I find out more and apply?

• If you haven’t already, read the job description for our open research positions here.
• Listen to this podcast interview that I did with the organization 80,000 Hours for more details about the kinds of questions we grapple with.
• If you think you could contribute at GiveWell, but don’t fit neatly into any of the researcher roles, email jobs@givewell.org with a copy of your resume, a cover letter, and a demonstration of what you could contribute to our work.
• If you have questions about working here which aren’t answered in the post, feel free to ask them in the comments and I’ll do my best to get back to you.

If you’re excited about working at GiveWell, you can apply for the researcher positions here.

Some notes on the application process

Hiring is one of the most important decisions GiveWell makes so we want to do everything we can to ensure we hire the right people. While work trials take a lot of time, we think they’re the only reliable way for both GiveWell and applicants to figure out if it’ll be a good fit long term. They also give people the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do, even if they don’t come from a stereotypical academic background.

As such, the application process has six stages, three of which involve doing work trials, and generally takes between 35 and 55 hours for people who reach the latest stages.

1. Initial application: upload your resume, answer some brief questions, and take an online test. (~90 minutes)
2. Conversation notes: Listen to a recording of an interview we conducted and take formal conversation notes. (3-8 hours, compensated)
3. Case study interview: Answering a question GiveWell has previously worked on. (~2 hours)
4. Work assignment: Critical review of some evidence to reach a considered conclusion in limited time. (~10 hours, compensated)
5. Remote trial: Working closely with a senior member of our research team. (10-20 hours, compensated)
6. Interview day: 1-2 days in the San Francisco office meeting the team and attending interviews. (7-14 hours, travel and accommodation reimbursed)

We recognize this is a fairly heavy time commitment for people who reach the later stages. To some extent, we think this is necessary. But to try to mitigate that cost, we:

• minimize the amount of time spent on the first stage of the process subject to it still giving us relevant information.
• let people know as soon as we think it’s not going to work out. Only people who get to the next stage need to complete that task.
• compensate people for time spent on major work trial tasks, and for travel expenses when they visit the office.
• are flexible around peoples’ schedules for coming to visit the office.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ $133 million includes (i) donations to our top charities through GiveWell, (ii) donations directly to our top charities where donors explicitly indicated their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation, and (iii) Incubation Grants funded by Good Ventures. $150 million includes our best guess of donations which were a result of our recommendations but for which donors did not explicitly indicate their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation. 2. ↑ The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made $4.7 billion in grants in 2017, with 1,541 employees = ~$3 million per employee. 3. ↑ This project is still in progress and hasn’t yet been published on our website. 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 What is it like to work at GiveWell? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We (GiveWell) recently announced that we’re planning to expand the scope of our research and to roughly double the size of our full-time research staff (from approximately 10 to 20) over the next three years. I (James) am writing this post because I think GiveWell is an awesome place to work and I think now is a particularly good time to join.

I’ll start by telling the story of how I started working with GiveWell’s research team. Then I’ll explain why I think it’s a great place to work and how you can decide if you’d like to work here. Finally, I’ll add some notes on what the application process looks like, and how much time it’s likely to take if you reach the later stages.

If there’s anything you want to learn about that I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to get back to you.

I should acknowledge that I was asked to write this post because I like my job a lot. I hope you’re willing to put this publication bias to one side for a few minutes.

My career before GiveWell

I started my career in consulting. It was OK, but I couldn’t shake the feelings that (a) I wasn’t doing anything useful, and (b) the research we did wasn’t always motivated by needing to get to the right answer. So after a few years I took an early career break, and went to do a master’s degree (in philosophy and economics). This was when I got really interested in figuring out where I should give money in order to most effectively help people.

I thought about applying to GiveWell during my master’s degree, but decided not to because my partner and I both lived and worked in London, and GiveWell is based in San Francisco. With hindsight, this was probably a mistake. I’ve done work remotely for GiveWell for the last two years, and—even though remote work does come with its challenges—it’s turned out just fine. Two years later, GiveWell applied for a visa for me, and I will join the staff this spring.

But back then, instead of applying to GiveWell, I joined the research team at the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA). Here, I realized that working out which charities help people the most was a question of incredible importance, depth and difficulty. I decided that I’d like to spend a good chunk of my life trying to answer it better.

As part of CEA’s research into cost-effective giving opportunities, I’d started looking into preventing pesticide suicide as a potential high impact area for philanthropy. However, before I’d completed my investigation, CEA decided to discontinue its philanthropic research activities. Fortunately, my manager sent my preliminary work to GiveWell, who interviewed me, asked me to do a work trial (20 hours, paid) and then offered me a position as a research consultant. Five months later, GiveWell made a grant of $1.3 million to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention as a direct result of my research. That felt great.

Why do I think GiveWell’s a great place to work?

When I was considering whether to join GiveWell, my main questions were:

1. How much does this job help people? (more)
2. Is the work intellectually stimulating? (more)
3. Is the work something I’m likely to be good at? (more)
4. Will I be working with people who are excellent at what they do, share my values, and are nice to be around? (more)
5. Will I be able to work remotely? (more)

I’ll go through each of these questions in turn.

You can help people a lot by working at GiveWell.

When you’re working as a philanthropic funder, your impact is a function of (i) how much funding you influence, and (ii) how much you can improve the allocation of that funding.

GiveWell influences a lot of funding. In 2017, we influenced between $133 million and $150 million.1$133 million includes (i) donations to our top charities through GiveWell, (ii) donations directly to our top charities where donors explicitly indicated their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation, and (iii) Incubation Grants funded by Good Ventures. $150 million includes our best guess of donations which were a result of our recommendations but for which donors did not explicitly indicate their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation. 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] });

We have 25 staff between the research, operations, and outreach teams, meaning that, on average each staff member influences ~$5-6 million each year. That’s more than individual staff influence at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world.2The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made $4.7 billion in grants in 2017, with 1,541 employees = ~$3 million per employee. 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 also have a lot of control over how those funds are granted, subject to being able to clearly explain the rationale for those grants to our colleagues and donors who rely on our research.

Taking the conservative estimate of the portion of that funding that went to our top charities (as opposed to Incubation Grants) we estimate that, in expectation, this $117 million prevented 19,000 deaths, administered 50 million deworming treatments, and gave cash to 8,300 poor households.

So how much have I personally influenced that funding?

I’ve been the lead investigator on three grants: a $1.3 million grant to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention, a $1 million grant to J-PAL’s Innovation in Government Initiative, and a $300,000 grant to Fortify Health. The first two of these grants likely would not have happened without my work.

I led the discussion of how to allocate $64 million of funding from Good Ventures in 2018 by developing principles for making this decision.

I’ve contributed to methodological improvements in our cost-effectiveness analysis, completed internal evidence reviews of tens of different programs, reviewed new research relevant to our top charities, and managed other researchers.

Today, I’m leading our research into new types of interventions that fall outside of our traditional top charity criteria, and am exploring opportunities to help aid agencies spend their money more cost-effectively. I think that both of these projects have the potential to massively increase GiveWell’s impact. They’re still at a very early stage, and we want to devote more capacity to them longer term, so I see this as an enormous opportunity for new people at GiveWell to help shape the organization’s future research agenda.

I don’t think this kind of impact is unusual for a GiveWell researcher. If you do well here, you’ll be given the opportunity to take direct ownership over a lot of your work, taking the lead on important decisions (with input from your manager and the rest of the team).

Without a detailed cost-effectiveness analysis, I can’t confidently state that GiveWell is the single most impactful place you could possibly work. But if you think improving the lives of people living in extreme poverty is of the utmost importance, I think it’s near the top.

The work is intellectually stimulating.

GiveWell’s work starts with the question, where should our donors give their money to maximize their impact on people living in the poorest parts of the world? We break this question down into its constituent parts, and answer each part to the best of our abilities.

For example, I’m currently looking into whether the effective regulation of lead paint might be a cost-effective way to improve childhood development outcomes.3This project is still in progress and hasn’t yet been published on our website. 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] }); This project involves:

1. Critically reviewing the academic literature on the links between (i) exposure to lead-based paint and high blood lead levels, (ii) high blood lead levels and cognitive function, and (iii) cognitive function and earnings.
2. Estimating the proportion of houses in low-income countries which are currently painted by using Google Maps random street view, and estimating the proportion of paint that contains lead by using paint studies.
3. Interviewing academic experts about the impact of lead on childhood development.
4. Interviewing implementers and doing online research to understand which organizations work on lead paint regulation, how much funding they currently receive, and how much an advocacy campaign costs.
5. Critically reviewing case studies of past campaigns to understand the factors that lead to successful regulation and enforcement.
6. Building a rough cost-effectiveness model using all of the above information.
7. Explaining and justifying my conclusions privately to the GiveWell team, and publicly to donors who rely on our work.

This work isn’t just taking the headline results of some studies and plugging them into a spreadsheet. It requires thinking carefully and critically about how to interpret the entirety of the evidence available to us. What sources of bias or variance exist; how should they affect our best guess of what is actually true? And, ultimately, what should we do?

How do I know if this is right for me?

You won’t know until you try it, and I’d recommend applying to be a GiveWell researcher even if you’re unsure. Our current recruiting process includes a 20-hour paid work trial for candidates in the later stages of the process, which is a great opportunity for both sides to work out if it’s a good fit. But I can offer some pointers about what might indicate you’ll like the work:

1. You should enjoy and be competent at understanding academic evidence. You don’t have to have a PhD (unless you’re applying for the Senior Fellow position), but you should understand, or be able to quickly learn, what to look for in a study in order to interpret its results and assess its merits.
2. You should be excited by broad, thorny questions with no obvious answers. Most of the important questions in the world haven’t been answered decisively by rigorous academic studies.
3. You should enjoy making clear arguments and critically assessing the arguments of others.
4. You should prefer working quickly (relative to academia) to get the best answer you can to guide your decisions, rather than spending lots of time diving deep on a narrow question that isn’t going to change your decision.
5. You should be OK with most of the work being desk-based. I’ve attended workshops and built relationships by traveling to meet people when they’ve been important for achieving our objectives, but we’re not interested in publicity or relationships for their own sake. The majority of research work involves reading and writing at your computer.

You don’t have to have all of these interests to succeed at GiveWell. I’m medium on 1 and 5, but close to maximum on 2, 3, and 4.

Another way to work out if you might enjoy the work is to read this post by Rachel Glennerster comparing academic and policy jobs.

If your reaction is these both sound great but policy jobs sound better, that’s a good sign. GiveWell researchers are more academically-minded and technical than typical grantmakers, but the work here is still closer to a policy job than an academic one. It’s this combination of academic rigor and practical recommendations that makes the job quite unique.

Will I be working with people who are excellent at what they do, share my values, and are nice to be around?

The people at GiveWell are among the most competent, kind and thoughtful people I’ve ever worked with. Some specific things I’ve observed about working at GiveWell:

• Managers put a lot of effort into helping their reports improve. The management philosophy generally focuses on making the most of your strengths, ahead of mitigating your weaknesses. Managers also share feedback frequently to stay in sync with reports on how things are going.
• Managers are very open to receiving feedback. During the first year I worked with GiveWell, I was constantly being asked what I disliked about my work. My disappointingly positive responses soon necessitated a switch to the un-dodgeable, “What’s the worst thing about working with GiveWell?”
• Staff at GiveWell are remarkably conscious of other people’s feelings. I’ve seen plenty of disagreement, but when I’ve disagreed with my colleagues, I’ve generally felt like we’re all on the same side trying to get to a better answer.
• Staff are very passionate about their work and take their jobs seriously, but GiveWell is flexible with working hours. We’re encouraged to work the hours in which we’re most productive, or fit our working hours around family commitments. Staff rarely feel pressure to work late into the evening, although they sometimes choose to do so.

Is it hard to work remotely?

Because I consult remotely from the UK, I don’t see as much of my colleagues as I’d like. A lot of people have asked me what it’s like working remotely and whether I have any tips. I do:

• If you’re going to work remotely, I’d recommend spending a few weeks in California as soon as possible (GiveWell is happy to pay for remote staff to visit four times a year). Remote meetings feel a lot better when you’ve met the person on the other side of the screen in person before.
• Make the most of the time you have for communication. The time difference between California and the UK has been a bigger issue for me than not being in the same location because I only have a few hours of overlap with most of GiveWell’s staff each day. There’s not really an easy solution to this, but it’s manageable if you’re efficient with that time.
• Consider relocating if you can. GiveWell is open to staff working remotely on a long-term basis (just under half of our researchers currently work remotely). This works fine when you’re largely doing independent research, but it’s harder when you’re managing people. GiveWell sponsors international visas, although these can take a long time to obtain.

How can I find out more and apply?

• If you haven’t already, read the job description for our open research positions here.
• Listen to this podcast interview that I did with the organization 80,000 Hours for more details about the kinds of questions we grapple with.
• If you think you could contribute at GiveWell, but don’t fit neatly into any of the researcher roles, email jobs@givewell.org with a copy of your resume, a cover letter, and a demonstration of what you could contribute to our work.
• If you have questions about working here which aren’t answered in the post, feel free to ask them in the comments and I’ll do my best to get back to you.

If you’re excited about working at GiveWell, you can apply for the researcher positions here.

Some notes on the application process

Hiring is one of the most important decisions GiveWell makes so we want to do everything we can to ensure we hire the right people. While work trials take a lot of time, we think they’re the only reliable way for both GiveWell and applicants to figure out if it’ll be a good fit long term. They also give people the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do, even if they don’t come from a stereotypical academic background.

As such, the application process has six stages, three of which involve doing work trials, and generally takes between 35 and 55 hours for people who reach the latest stages.

1. Initial application: upload your resume, answer some brief questions, and take an online test. (~90 minutes)
2. Conversation notes: Listen to a recording of an interview we conducted and take formal conversation notes. (3-8 hours, compensated)
3. Case study interview: Answering a question GiveWell has previously worked on. (~2 hours)
4. Work assignment: Critical review of some evidence to reach a considered conclusion in limited time. (~10 hours, compensated)
5. Remote trial: Working closely with a senior member of our research team. (10-20 hours, compensated)
6. Interview day: 1-2 days in the San Francisco office meeting the team and attending interviews. (7-14 hours, travel and accommodation reimbursed)

We recognize this is a fairly heavy time commitment for people who reach the later stages. To some extent, we think this is necessary. But to try to mitigate that cost, we:

• minimize the amount of time spent on the first stage of the process subject to it still giving us relevant information.
• let people know as soon as we think it’s not going to work out. Only people who get to the next stage need to complete that task.
• compensate people for time spent on major work trial tasks, and for travel expenses when they visit the office.
• are flexible around peoples’ schedules for coming to visit the office.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ $133 million includes (i) donations to our top charities through GiveWell, (ii) donations directly to our top charities where donors explicitly indicated their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation, and (iii) Incubation Grants funded by Good Ventures. $150 million includes our best guess of donations which were a result of our recommendations but for which donors did not explicitly indicate their donations were a result of GiveWell’s recommendation. 2. ↑ The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made $4.7 billion in grants in 2017, with 1,541 employees = ~$3 million per employee. 3. ↑ This project is still in progress and hasn’t yet been published on our website. 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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Today, we announced a grantmaking process to look for outstanding organizations operating in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh.

We’re working with Affinity Impact, a social impact initiative founded by the children of a Taiwanese entrepreneur, to provide three grants—one $250,000, and two $25,000 grants—to organizations that are operating programs in global health and development in any of the following countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam.

One of the goals of this grantmaking process is to help us better understand the giving opportunities in a geography in which we haven’t previously focused, and to learn from the grantmaking process whether doing so is an effective way to engage with philanthropists who don’t plan to support our current top charities. An overview of this process is available here. Details of the application process are here. Applications are due on April 1, 2019.

If you represent an organization applying or considering applying for the grant and have any additional questions, please contact us directly via email at applications@givewell.org and mention that you’re applying for the “2019 GiveWell Grants for Global Health and Development in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh.” We will try to respond as quickly as possible.

The post Announcing a call for grant applicants in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Today, we announced a grantmaking process to look for outstanding organizations operating in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh.

We’re working with Affinity Impact, a social impact initiative founded by the children of a Taiwanese entrepreneur, to provide three grants—one $250,000, and two $25,000 grants—to organizations that are operating programs in global health and development in any of the following countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam.

One of the goals of this grantmaking process is to help us better understand the giving opportunities in a geography in which we haven’t previously focused, and to learn from the grantmaking process whether doing so is an effective way to engage with philanthropists who don’t plan to support our current top charities. An overview of this process is available here. Details of the application process are here. Applications are due on April 1, 2019.

If you represent an organization applying or considering applying for the grant and have any additional questions, please contact us directly via email at applications@givewell.org and mention that you’re applying for the “2019 GiveWell Grants for Global Health and Development in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh.” We will try to respond as quickly as possible.

The post Announcing a call for grant applicants in Southeast Asia and Bangladesh appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

To date, most of GiveWell’s research capacity has focused on finding the most impactful programs among those whose results can be rigorously measured. This work has led us to recommend, and direct several hundred million dollars to, charities improving health, saving lives, and increasing income in low-income countries.

One of the most important reasons we have focused on programs where robust measurement is possible is because this approach largely does not rely on subject-matter expertise. When Holden and I started GiveWell, neither of us had any experience in philanthropy, so we looked for charities that we could evaluate through data and evidence that we could analyze, to make recommendations that we could fully explain. This led us to focus on organizations that had impacts that were relatively easy to measure.

The output of this process is reflected in our current top charities and the programs they run, which are analyzed in our intervention reports.

GiveWell has now been doing research to find the best giving opportunities in global health and development for 11 years, and we plan to increase the scope of giving opportunities we consider. We plan to expand our research team and scope in order to determine whether there are giving opportunities in global health and development that are more cost-effective than those we have identified to date.

We expect this expansion of our work to take us in a number of new directions, some of which we have begun to explore over the past few years. We have considered, in a few cases, the impact our top and standout charities have through providing technical assistance (for example, Deworm the World and Project Healthy Children), supported work to change government policies through our Incubation Grants program (for example, grants to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention and Innovation in Government Initiative), and begun to explore areas like tobacco policy and lead paint elimination.

Over the next several years, we plan to consider everything that we believe could be among the most cost-effective (broadly defined) giving opportunities in global health and development. This includes more comprehensively reviewing direct interventions in sectors where impacts are more difficult to measure, investigating opportunities to influence government policy, as well as other areas.

Making progress in areas where it is harder to determine causality will be challenging. In my opinion, we are excellent evaluators of empirical research, but we have yet to demonstrate the ability to make good judgments about giving opportunities when less empirical information is available. Our values, intellectual framework, culture, and the quality of our staff make me optimistic about our chances, but all of us at GiveWell recognize the difficulty of the project we are embarking on.

Our staff does not currently have the capacity or the capabilities to make enough progress in this direction, so we are planning to significantly increase the size of our staff. We have a research team of ten people, and we are planning to more than double in size over the next three years. We are planning to add some junior staff but are primarily aiming to hire people with relevant experience who can contribute as researchers and/or managers on our team.

GiveWell’s top charities list is not going to change dramatically in the near future, and it may always include the charities we recommend today. Our top charities achieve outstanding, cost-effective results, and we believe they are some of the best giving opportunities in global health and development. We expect to conclude that many of the opportunities we consider in areas that are new for us are less cost-effective than those we currently recommend, but we also think it is possible that we will identify some opportunities that are much more cost-effective. We believe it is worth a major effort to find out.

What areas will we look into?

As with any exploration into a new area, we expect the specifics of the work we will undertake to shift as we learn more. Below we discuss two major areas of work we are embarking on and building our team for currently. In the long term, we are open to considering making grants or recommendations in all areas of global health and development. We have not yet comprehensively considered what those areas might be, but they could include (for example) research and development, or social entrepreneurship.

Using reasoned judgment and less robust evidence to come to conclusions about additional direct-delivery interventions

In the past, we have often asked, “does this intervention meet our criteria?” rather than “what is our best guess about how promising this intervention is relative to our top charities?” Our intervention report on education is a good example of asking the question, “does this meet our criteria?” It reviews all randomized controlled trials of education programs that measure long-term outcomes, but it does not attempt to reach a bottom line about how cost-effective education in developing countries is.

We plan to more deeply explore how we can reach conclusions about how areas such as nutrition, agriculture, education, reproductive health, surgical interventions, mental health, and non-communicable diseases compare to our current top charities.

Investigating opportunities to improve government spending and influence government policy

Some of the areas we will consider exploring to leverage government resources and affect government policy are:

Broad thematic area Examples Brief rationale Public health regulation Tobacco control; lead paint regulation; road traffic safety; air pollution regulation; micronutrient fortification and biofortification; sugar control; salt control; trans-fats control; legislation to reduce counterfeit drugs; soil pollution; pesticide regulation; occupational safety laws Some regulatory interventions to improve public health have had a large impact in high-income countries. Low-income countries can lack the government capacity or political will to implement these regulations. Charities can advocate or provide technical assistance to accelerate regulation and improve implementation. Improving government program selection Innovation in Government Initiative; Innovations for Poverty Action; IDInsight; Center for Effective Global Action Low-income country governments may not have the capabilities to select good programs to support with their limited budgets. Charities can directly assist governments to make better decisions in the short term, or help improve their capabilities to do so independently over the longer term. Improving government implementation Results for Development; Deworm the World in India Low-income countries may not have the capabilities to implement programs effectively. Charities can directly assist governments to improve the reach or quality of programs in the short term, or help improve their capabilities to do so independently over the longer term. Improving non-programmatic government capabilities Building State Capability Improving the administrative capabilities of a government can result in broad improvements in the way countries function. Improved or increased aid spending Center for Global Development; ONE Campaign; Overseas Development Institute; Brookings Institution Spending by high-income countries on global health and development accounts for a large portion of total spending in this area. There are groups who advocate for, and provide technical assistance to improve aid spending. Advocating for increased spending on highly cost-effective, direct-delivery programs Malaria No More; Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases GiveWell’s money moved is a small proportion of total global spending on aid. We believe these dollars would go further if a portion were redirected to the highly cost-effective, direct-delivery programs we recommend. Increasing economic growth and redistribution Charter cities; infrastructure programs; trade liberalization; macroeconomic policy; International Growth Centre; tax reform Economic growth is an important driver of economic well-being over the long term. Government policies can be an important determinant of the rate of economic growth and the degree to which growth translates into well-being for the population. There may be opportunities for charities to assist in promoting growth and better distributional outcomes. Negative externalities of high-income country policies Immigration reform; trade liberalization; reducing carbon emissions Governments of high-income countries are incentivized to select policies which are popular with their own voters. These policies can impose substantial costs on low-income countries. Charities can advocate for these policies to be changed. Improving governance Election monitoring; anti-corruption; good governance awards; term limits; peace programs There are particular characteristics of the governance of a country (e.g. democratic accountability, stability, human rights, lack of corruption) which are strongly associated with the well-being of its people. Charities can advocate for these characteristics to be adopted or strengthened. Reducing the cost of health commodities Clinton Health Access Initiative Reductions in the cost of medical commodities can result in improved coverage and improved economic well-being for low-income households. Improving data collection Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Improved data can be used by a variety of actors to make better decisions. One-off big bets Mosquito gene drives advocacy and research We may come across promising projects that do not fit neatly into one of the above categories. How will our analysis change? How will it be the same?

Writing up and publishing the details of the reasoning behind the recommendations we make is a core part of GiveWell. We will remain fully transparent about our research.

Judgment calls that are not easily grounded in empirical data have long been a part of GiveWell’s research. For example, we make difficult, decision-relevant judgment calls about moral weights, interpreting conflicting evidence about deworming, and estimating the crowding-out and crowding-in effects of our donations on other actors (what we call leverage and funging).

As we move into areas where measuring outcomes and attributing causal impact is more difficult, we expect subjective judgments to play a larger role in our decision making. For examples of the approach we have taken to date, see our writeup of our recent recommendation for a grant to the Innovation in Government Initiative, a grantmaking entity within the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) or our page evaluating phase I of our 2016 grant to Results for Development (R4D). While writing about such judgments will be a challenge of this work, we are fully committed to sharing what has led us to our decisions, with only limited exceptions due to confidential or sensitive information.

What does this mean for staffing and organizational growth?

We need to grow our team to achieve our goals. Repeatedly this past year, we had to make the difficult choice to not take on a research project or investigate a grant opportunity that seemed promising because we did not have the capacity.

We are planning to roughly double our research team over the next few years, primarily by adding researchers who have experience and/or an academic background in global health and development. We are looking to add both individual contributors and research managers to the team. We expect that the people we hire in the next few years will play a critical role in shaping GiveWell’s future research agenda and will be some of the leaders of GiveWell in the future.

For more information about the research roles we’re hiring for, see our jobs.

The post How GiveWell’s research is evolving appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

To date, most of GiveWell's research capacity has focused on finding the most impactful programs among those whose results can be rigorously measured. This work has led us to recommend, and direct several hundred million dollars to, charities improving health, saving lives, and increasing income in low-income countries.

One of the most important reasons we have focused on programs where robust measurement is possible is because this approach largely does not rely on subject-matter expertise. When Holden and I started GiveWell, neither of us had any experience in philanthropy, so we looked for charities that we could evaluate through data and evidence that we could analyze, to make recommendations that we could fully explain. This led us to focus on organizations that had impacts that were relatively easy to measure.

The output of this process is reflected in our current top charities and the programs they run, which are analyzed in our intervention reports.

GiveWell has now been doing research to find the best giving opportunities in global health and development for 11 years, and we plan to increase the scope of giving opportunities we consider. We plan to expand our research team and scope in order to determine whether there are giving opportunities in global health and development that are more cost-effective than those we have identified to date.

We expect this expansion of our work to take us in a number of new directions, some of which we have begun to explore over the past few years. We have considered, in a few cases, the impact our top and standout charities have through providing technical assistance (for example, Deworm the World and Project Healthy Children), supported work to change government policies through our Incubation Grants program (for example, grants to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention and Innovation in Government Initiative), and begun to explore areas like tobacco policy and lead paint elimination.

Over the next several years, we plan to consider everything that we believe could be among the most cost-effective (broadly defined) giving opportunities in global health and development. This includes more comprehensively reviewing direct interventions in sectors where impacts are more difficult to measure, investigating opportunities to influence government policy, as well as other areas.

Making progress in areas where it is harder to determine causality will be challenging. In my opinion, we are excellent evaluators of empirical research, but we have yet to demonstrate the ability to make good judgments about giving opportunities when less empirical information is available. Our values, intellectual framework, culture, and the quality of our staff make me optimistic about our chances, but all of us at GiveWell recognize the difficulty of the project we are embarking on.

Our staff does not currently have the capacity or the capabilities to make enough progress in this direction, so we are planning to significantly increase the size of our staff. We have a research team of ten people, and we are planning to more than double in size over the next three years. We are planning to add some junior staff but are primarily aiming to hire people with relevant experience who can contribute as researchers and/or managers on our team.

GiveWell's top charities list is not going to change dramatically in the near future, and it may always include the charities we recommend today. Our top charities achieve outstanding, cost-effective results, and we believe they are some of the best giving opportunities in global health and development. We expect to conclude that many of the opportunities we consider in areas that are new for us are less cost-effective than those we currently recommend, but we also think it is possible that we will identify some opportunities that are much more cost-effective. We believe it is worth a major effort to find out.

Read More

The post How GiveWell’s research is evolving appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

To date, most of GiveWell’s research capacity has focused on finding the most impactful programs among those whose results can be rigorously measured. This work has led us to recommend, and direct several hundred million dollars to, charities improving health, saving lives, and increasing income in low-income countries.

One of the most important reasons we have focused on programs where robust measurement is possible is because this approach largely does not rely on subject-matter expertise. When Holden and I started GiveWell, neither of us had any experience in philanthropy, so we looked for charities that we could evaluate through data and evidence that we could analyze, to make recommendations that we could fully explain. This led us to focus on organizations that had impacts that were relatively easy to measure.

The output of this process is reflected in our current top charities and the programs they run, which are analyzed in our intervention reports.

GiveWell has now been doing research to find the best giving opportunities in global health and development for 11 years, and we plan to increase the scope of giving opportunities we consider. We plan to expand our research team and scope in order to determine whether there are giving opportunities in global health and development that are more cost-effective than those we have identified to date.

We expect this expansion of our work to take us in a number of new directions, some of which we have begun to explore over the past few years. We have considered, in a few cases, the impact our top and standout charities have through providing technical assistance (for example, Deworm the World and Project Healthy Children), supported work to change government policies through our Incubation Grants program (for example, grants to the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention and Innovation in Government Initiative), and begun to explore areas like tobacco policy and lead paint elimination.

Over the next several years, we plan to consider everything that we believe could be among the most cost-effective (broadly defined) giving opportunities in global health and development. This includes more comprehensively reviewing direct interventions in sectors where impacts are more difficult to measure, investigating opportunities to influence government policy, as well as other areas.

Making progress in areas where it is harder to determine causality will be challenging. In my opinion, we are excellent evaluators of empirical research, but we have yet to demonstrate the ability to make good judgments about giving opportunities when less empirical information is available. Our values, intellectual framework, culture, and the quality of our staff make me optimistic about our chances, but all of us at GiveWell recognize the difficulty of the project we are embarking on.

Our staff does not currently have the capacity or the capabilities to make enough progress in this direction, so we are planning to significantly increase the size of our staff. We have a research team of ten people, and we are planning to more than double in size over the next three years. We are planning to add some junior staff but are primarily aiming to hire people with relevant experience who can contribute as researchers and/or managers on our team.

GiveWell’s top charities list is not going to change dramatically in the near future, and it may always include the charities we recommend today. Our top charities achieve outstanding, cost-effective results, and we believe they are some of the best giving opportunities in global health and development. We expect to conclude that many of the opportunities we consider in areas that are new for us are less cost-effective than those we currently recommend, but we also think it is possible that we will identify some opportunities that are much more cost-effective. We believe it is worth a major effort to find out.

What areas will we look into?

As with any exploration into a new area, we expect the specifics of the work we will undertake to shift as we learn more. Below we discuss two major areas of work we are embarking on and building our team for currently. In the long term, we are open to considering making grants or recommendations in all areas of global health and development. We have not yet comprehensively considered what those areas might be, but they could include (for example) research and development, or social entrepreneurship.

Using reasoned judgment and less robust evidence to come to conclusions about additional direct-delivery interventions

In the past, we have often asked, “does this intervention meet our criteria?” rather than “what is our best guess about how promising this intervention is relative to our top charities?” Our intervention report on education is a good example of asking the question, “does this meet our criteria?” It reviews all randomized controlled trials of education programs that measure long-term outcomes, but it does not attempt to reach a bottom line about how cost-effective education in developing countries is.

We plan to more deeply explore how we can reach conclusions about how areas such as nutrition, agriculture, education, reproductive health, surgical interventions, mental health, and non-communicable diseases compare to our current top charities.

Investigating opportunities to improve government spending and influence government policy

Some of the areas we will consider exploring to leverage government resources and affect government policy are:

Broad thematic area Examples Brief rationale Public health regulation Tobacco control; lead paint regulation; road traffic safety; air pollution regulation; micronutrient fortification and biofortification; sugar control; salt control; trans-fats control; legislation to reduce counterfeit drugs; soil pollution; pesticide regulation; occupational safety laws Some regulatory interventions to improve public health have had a large impact in high-income countries. Low-income countries can lack the government capacity or political will to implement these regulations. Charities can advocate or provide technical assistance to accelerate regulation and improve implementation. Improving government program selection Innovation in Government Initiative; Innovations for Poverty Action; IDInsight; Center for Effective Global Action Low-income country governments may not have the capabilities to select good programs to support with their limited budgets. Charities can directly assist governments to make better decisions in the short term, or help improve their capabilities to do so independently over the longer term. Improving government implementation Results for Development; Deworm the World in India Low-income countries may not have the capabilities to implement programs effectively. Charities can directly assist governments to improve the reach or quality of programs in the short term, or help improve their capabilities to do so independently over the longer term. Improving non-programmatic government capabilities Building State Capability Improving the administrative capabilities of a government can result in broad improvements in the way countries function. Improved or increased aid spending Center for Global Development; ONE Campaign; Overseas Development Institute; Brookings Institution Spending by high-income countries on global health and development accounts for a large portion of total spending in this area. There are groups who advocate for, and provide technical assistance to improve aid spending. Advocating for increased spending on highly cost-effective, direct-delivery programs Malaria No More; Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases GiveWell’s money moved is a small proportion of total global spending on aid. We believe these dollars would go further if a portion were redirected to the highly cost-effective, direct-delivery programs we recommend. Increasing economic growth and redistribution Charter cities; infrastructure programs; trade liberalization; macroeconomic policy; International Growth Centre; tax reform Economic growth is an important driver of economic well-being over the long term. Government policies can be an important determinant of the rate of economic growth and the degree to which growth translates into well-being for the population. There may be opportunities for charities to assist in promoting growth and better distributional outcomes. Negative externalities of high-income country policies Immigration reform; trade liberalization; reducing carbon emissions Governments of high-income countries are incentivized to select policies which are popular with their own voters. These policies can impose substantial costs on low-income countries. Charities can advocate for these policies to be changed. Improving governance Election monitoring; anti-corruption; good governance awards; term limits; peace programs There are particular characteristics of the governance of a country (e.g. democratic accountability, stability, human rights, lack of corruption) which are strongly associated with the well-being of its people. Charities can advocate for these characteristics to be adopted or strengthened. Reducing the cost of health commodities Clinton Health Access Initiative Reductions in the cost of medical commodities can result in improved coverage and improved economic well-being for low-income households. Improving data collection Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Improved data can be used by a variety of actors to make better decisions. One-off big bets Mosquito gene drives advocacy and research We may come across promising projects that do not fit neatly into one of the above categories. How will our analysis change? How will it be the same?

Writing up and publishing the details of the reasoning behind the recommendations we make is a core part of GiveWell. We will remain fully transparent about our research.

Judgment calls that are not easily grounded in empirical data have long been a part of GiveWell’s research. For example, we make difficult, decision-relevant judgment calls about moral weights, interpreting conflicting evidence about deworming, and estimating the crowding-out and crowding-in effects of our donations on other actors (what we call leverage and funging).

As we move into areas where measuring outcomes and attributing causal impact is more difficult, we expect subjective judgments to play a larger role in our decision making. For examples of the approach we have taken to date, see our writeup of our recent recommendation for a grant to the Innovation in Government Initiative, a grantmaking entity within the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) or our page evaluating phase I of our 2016 grant to Results for Development (R4D). While writing about such judgments will be a challenge of this work, we are fully committed to sharing what has led us to our decisions, with only limited exceptions due to confidential or sensitive information.

What does this mean for staffing and organizational growth?

We need to grow our team to achieve our goals. Repeatedly this past year, we had to make the difficult choice to not take on a research project or investigate a grant opportunity that seemed promising because we did not have the capacity.

We are planning to roughly double our research team over the next few years, primarily by adding researchers who have experience and/or an academic background in global health and development. We are looking to add both individual contributors and research managers to the team. We expect that the people we hire in the next few years will play a critical role in shaping GiveWell’s future research agenda and will be some of the leaders of GiveWell in the future.

For more information about the research roles we’re hiring for, see our jobs.

The post How GiveWell’s research is evolving appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

If you’re thinking about where to give to charity this year and it would be helpful to speak with a member of GiveWell’s staff about your decision, please let us know. We’re happy to answer questions sent to info@givewell.org or to schedule a call via the form here.

On a call, we’d be glad to:

• Provide an overview of our recommendations. We know it can be time-consuming to read and digest all of the content on our website. We’re glad to share a quick summary of our top charities list.
• Assist with the logistics of making a donation and discuss different options for donating, such as appreciated securities, checks, and wire transfers.
• Answer any questions about our research or recommendations.

Due to limited staff capacity, it’s possible we won’t be able to speak with everyone who requests a call, although based on past experience we hope to be able to connect with anyone who gets in touch.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The post Schedule a quick call to make giving easier appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

If you’re thinking about where to give to charity this year and it would be helpful to speak with a member of GiveWell’s staff about your decision, please let us know. We’re happy to answer questions sent to info@givewell.org or to schedule a call via the form here.

On a call, we’d be glad to:

• Provide an overview of our recommendations. We know it can be time-consuming to read and digest all of the content on our website. We’re glad to share a quick summary of our top charities list.
• Assist with the logistics of making a donation and discuss different options for donating, such as appreciated securities, checks, and wire transfers.
• Answer any questions about our research or recommendations.

Due to limited staff capacity, it’s possible we won’t be able to speak with everyone who requests a call, although based on past experience we hope to be able to connect with anyone who gets in touch.

We look forward to hearing from you!

The post Schedule a quick call to make giving easier 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 our September 2018 open thread here.

The post December 2018 open thread 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 our September 2018 open thread here.

The post December 2018 open thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

For this post, GiveWell staff members wrote up the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We made similar posts in previous years.1See our staff giving posts from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. 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] }); Staff are listed in order of their start dates at GiveWell.

You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry:

• Elie Hassenfeld
• Natalie Crispin
• Josh Rosenberg
• Devin Jacob
• Catherine Hollander
• Andrew Martin
• Christian Smith
• Isabel Arjmand
• James Snowden
• Dan Brown
• Olivia Larsen
• Amar Radia

Elie Hassenfeld

This year, I’m planning to donate to GiveWell for granting to top charities at its discretion.

I feel the same way I did last year, when I wrote, “GiveWell is currently producing the highest-quality research it ever has, which has led to more thoroughly researched, higher-quality recommendations that have been compared to more potential alternatives than ever before.”

I asked Holden Karnofsky, GiveWell’s co-founder, whether he thought there were promising opportunities for individuals with long-termist views; after checking with him, I believed that the Open Philanthropy Project and other donors were covering most of the opportunities I would find most promising.

I also considered giving to animal welfare organizations. I looked briefly at Animal Charity Evaluators’ research but ultimately didn’t feel like I had enough time to think through how their recommendations compared to giving to GiveWell, so I defaulted to GiveWell. I hope to give this more consideration in the future.

Natalie Crispin

I will be giving my annual gift to GiveWell for granting at its discretion to top charities. We expect that all of our top charities will be constrained by funding in the next year and that several will have unfunded opportunities to spend funds in highly cost-effective ways (at least 5 times as cost-effective as cash transfers). Our current best guess is that GiveWell will grant the funds it receives for granting at its discretion to Malaria Consortium, which would allow it to expand its work preventing child deaths from malaria in Nigeria or other countries. There is also a possibility that we will identify an opportunity that is more cost-effective than how Malaria Consortium would use funding at the current margin. Over the next few months, we will be discussing with our top charities how they plan to use funding from Good Ventures and other funders and what that means for how they would use additional funding. Giving to GiveWell for granting at its discretion allows for flexibility to take advantage of those opportunities.

I am very grateful for all the work, thoughtfulness, and hours of debate that my colleagues put into GiveWell’s recommendations this year. I am excited to support the most effective charities I know of.

Josh Rosenberg

I’m planning to give the same way that I did last year:

• 80% to GiveWell for granting at its discretion to top charities. GiveWell’s top charities are the most cost-effective ways to help people that I know of. I see Malaria Consortium’s work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention (the current default option for discretionary funding) as a robust and highly effective giving opportunity.
• 10% to animal welfare charities. I believe that animal welfare is a particularly important and neglected problem.
• 10% to long-term future-oriented causes. I have not yet chosen a donation target in this cause area. If I do not find an opportunity I am satisfied with after a small amount of additional research, I will enter this portion of my giving into a donor lottery.

I focused most of my giving on global health and development since GiveWell’s top charities have the most pressing funding gaps I am aware of. If I knew of an especially strong case for a particular giving opportunity in another cause area, I would be open to changing my allocation in the future.

Devin Jacob

I plan on making approximately 80% of my charitable donations in 2018 to GiveWell, with 100% of that money allocated to GiveDirectly. Compared to my colleagues at GiveWell, I value near-term improvements in material well-being more than I value reducing deaths. Donating to GiveDirectly is the best means of supporting this goal that I know of.

I struggle each year when attempting to assess whether I should bet on the possible long-term income effects of deworming. To date I have been unable to convince myself I should make this bet, even though I find little to argue with in our work on the expected value of donations to charities implementing deworming programs. I am making a decision to ignore the difference in expected value between a donation to a deworming charity and a donation to GiveDirectly due to the greater certainty of impact via the latter. I think my approach to charitable giving is conservative relative to other staff at GiveWell and many of our donors but I also think that my approach is reasonable given my specific ethical commitments.

I also support other organizations with gifts each year. This year, approximately 10-15% of my giving will go to organizations that do not meet GiveWell’s criteria. These organizations work in a number of areas including:

• Immigration policy, activism, and legal aid – International Refugee Assistance Project, RAICES, and the National Immigration Law Center
• Nonprofit news – primarily CALmatters, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica
• Local issues I care about such as transit infrastructure – eg, Bike East Bay
• Other political causes

I choose to keep the political contributions I make private as some of the causes I support are controversial and I would not want my political beliefs to have any potential impact on GiveWell’s work.

In the course of my day-to-day work duties at GiveWell, I also frequently make small donations to our charities when testing various payment platforms. To date, these donations account for approximately 5-10% of my remaining planned gifts in 2018. These gifts are distributed among our recommended and standout charities haphazardly. I could refund these transactions, but choose not to do that as I think all of our recommended charities do excellent work and I am happy to support them.

Catherine Hollander

I plan to give 75% of my total charitable giving to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. I value averting deaths quite highly and I believe, based on GiveWell’s assessment, that contributing toward filling Malaria Consortium’s funding gap will accomplish a lot of good in the world. In previous years (2017, 2016, and 2015), the majority of my gift has been directed to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), but I believe Malaria Consortium currently has a more pressing funding gap for its seasonal malaria chemoprevention work.

I plan to give 10% of my total giving to AMF to continue their work. I understand that giving predictably is helpful for organizations’ planning and I don’t wish to abruptly alter my support for AMF. I also think that AMF continues to represent an outstanding giving opportunity as one of GiveWell’s top charities.

I plan to give 5% of my total giving to StrongMinds, an organization focused on treating depression in Africa. I have not vetted this organization anywhere nearly as closely as GiveWell’s top charities have been vetted, though I understand that a number of people in the effective altruism community have a positive view of StrongMinds within the cause area of mental health (though I don’t have any reason to think it is more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities). Intuitively, I believe mental health is an important cause area for donors to consider, and although we do not have GiveWell recommendations in this space, I would like to learn more about this area by making a relatively small donation to an organization that focuses on it.

I plan to give the remaining 10% of my charitable giving this year in conjunction with my partner to an organization working on criminal justice reform in the United States. We are going to discuss and review organizations together between now and the end of the year and make a joint gift in this space. I plan to consult previous recommendations made by Open Philanthropy Project’s program officer focused on criminal justice reform, Chloe Cockburn, as well as checking with friends who are better informed of the needs in this space than I am.

Andrew Martin

I think there’s a strong case for donating to GiveWell to grant to top charities at its discretion this year.

Our top charities have substantial funding gaps for highly cost-effective programs, even after taking the $63.2 million that we’ve recommended that Good Ventures allocate between our top charities into account. These funding gaps include expanding Malaria Consortium’s work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Nigeria, Chad, and Burkina Faso, extending HKI’s vitamin A supplementation programs in several countries over the next three years, and extending Deworm the World’s programs in Pakistan and Nigeria.

As Natalie and James have noted, it seems likely that donations given to GiveWell at the end of 2018 to allocate at its discretion will be directed to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. I’m planning to donate to GiveWell to allocate at its discretion because I expect that GiveWell will either direct those funds to Malaria Consortium or to another funding gap it judges to be even more valuable to fill.

Christian Smith

I’m planning to make my year-end donation to Malaria Consortium for its seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program. As my colleagues have mentioned, Malaria Consortium appears to be in a great position for scaling up a highly-effective intervention in areas with substantial malaria burdens.

I decided not to give to GiveWell for granting at its discretion because I think there’s a chance GiveWell will decide deworming programs look more worthwhile than SMC on the margin. I take a more skeptical stance than most of my colleagues on the value of deworming programs. While I’m not confident, I would guess that our process for modeling the value of deworming relative to malaria prevention puts deworming in too favorable a light.

Isabel Arjmand

My giving this year looks very similar to last year’s. It’s important to me for the bulk of my giving to go to organizations where I’m confident that my donation will have a substantial impact, and I don’t know of any giving opportunities in that vein that are as strong as GiveWell’s top charities. Each year I also give to a handful of other organizations, some in international development and others operating in the United States. I intend each of those donations to be large enough to be meaningful to me and to signal support for these programs, while still leaving the vast majority for GiveWell-recommended charities. In all, 80% of my charitable budget is going to GiveWell’s top charities and 20% to other causes, which is the same as my donation last year.

I’m giving 75% of my total year-end donation to grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion. I strongly considered designating my donation to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program instead. I’m very excited about Malaria Consortium’s opportunity to provide SMC in Nigeria; I’ve been particularly impressed by Malaria Consortium as an organization over the past year; and I have more confidence in SMC as an intervention than I do in some others. It’s hard for me to imagine preferring for my donation to go elsewhere when it’s time for GiveWell to grant out its discretionary funding from the fourth quarter of 2018. But, I believe that if GiveWell does decide to give the next round of discretionary funding elsewhere, I’m more likely than not to agree with that decision. I hold this belief in part because my moral weights and overall outputs in our cost-effectiveness analysis are quite similar to the median staff member, and while I’m concerned about the evidence for deworming, I think that concern is adequately reflected in my cost-effectiveness analysis inputs.

An additional 5% of my donation will go to GiveDirectly. I look forward to continuing to follow the work they do, particularly their cash benchmarking project, their work with refugees, and their continual research to improve the effectiveness of their programs.

I plan to distribute the remaining 20% of my donation across the following organizations:

• International Refugee Assistance Project, which advocates for refugees and displaced people with a focus on those from the Middle East.
• StrongMinds, which is the most promising organization I know of focused on mental health in low- and middle-income countries.
• Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which takes a comprehensive, intersectional view of women’s health and reproductive justice.
• Cool Earth, which works with local communities to protect rainforests and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

As I wrote last year, I’d be somewhat surprised if these organizations were competitively cost-effective with GiveWell’s top charities, and I haven’t vetted them with an intensity that comes anywhere close to the rigor of GiveWell evaluations. I choose to support these programs in order to promote more justice-focused causes, further my own civic engagement, and signal support for work I think is important.

I also make small donations throughout the year to grassroots organizations working in the Bay Area like Causa Justa :: Just Cause, Initiate Justice, and the Sogorea Te Land Trust. These donations, which are motivated primarily by community engagement and relationship-building, come out of my personal discretionary spending, rather than what I budget for charitable giving.

As always, I’m grateful for the thoughtfulness of my colleagues, the work that went into producing this year’s recommendations, and the conversations we’ve had that have informed my own giving.

James Snowden

I’m planning to donate to GiveWell for allocating funds at its discretion because (i) I prefer GiveWell to have the flexibility to react to new information, and (ii) in the absence of new information, I expect additional funds will be allocated to Malaria Consortium, the charity I would have given to. I expect Malaria Consortium would use those funds to scale up seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso. According to the Global Burden of Disease, Nigeria has the most deaths from malaria of any country, and Burkina Faso has the highest rate of deaths from malaria given its population size. This drives my view that donations to Malaria Consortium are likely to be more cost-effective than donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, which sometimes distributes nets in countries with a lower malaria burden.

I may also continue to give a smaller proportion of my donations to organizations working on improving animal welfare, and focused on the long-term future, but haven’t yet decided whether to do so, or where to give.

Dan Brown

I will give 75% of my 2018 charity donation to GiveWell to allocate to recommended charities at its discretion. This is my first year working for GiveWell and I’ve been very impressed with the quality of work that goes into our recommendations. My moral values seem to be quite close to the median values across staff members in our cost-effectiveness analysis, and so I see no reason to deviate from GiveWell’s choice on that basis. As Natalie and James note, our best guess is that these funds will be allocated to Malaria Consortium to scale up its seasonal malaria chemoprevention programs.

I will give 15% of my donation to No Means No Worldwide, a global rape prevention organisation. I spent a reasonable amount of time during my PhD researching gender based violence. This encouraged me to donate to an organisation tackling sexual violence, particularly because the frequency of sexual violence globally is staggering. I have not vetted No Means No Worldwide with anything like the rigor of a GiveWell evaluation, but I have been impressed by what I have read so far (e.g. they are evaluating their program using RCTs, and I like that part of their approach is to promote positive masculinity amongst boys).

I will give 6% of my donation to Stonewall (UK), an organisation tackling discrimination against LGBT people. Whilst I have focused most of my donation on global health and development, I would also like to support a more justice-focused cause. I have fairly limited information with which to choose amongst charities in this area as I’m not aware of a GiveWell-type organisation to help direct my donation. However, I would like to see more done to tackle homophobia in sport, and the main organisation I am aware of that has tried to do this is Stonewall (UK) (through its Rainbow Laces campaign).

I will give the remaining 4% of my donation to Afrinspire. I have donated to this charity for a number of years. To my knowledge, the money I donate is used to help pay for school costs for orphaned children in Kampala (through the Jaguza Initiative). I do not expect this to be as cost-effective as other charitable giving opportunities, but I do not think it would be responsible to unexpectedly decrease this donation now that I am paying more attention personally to cost-effectiveness.

Olivia Larsen

This year, I plan to give 95% of my year-end donation to GiveWell for granting at its discretion. This is my first year working at GiveWell full-time, and it will be my first time contributing to GiveWell’s discretionary fund.

In previous years, I have chosen to support specific top charities among GiveWell’s recommendations. Knowing which charity I was supporting in advance of my donation helped me more clearly conceptualize the impact I was making. Since starting at GiveWell, however, I’ve seen the level of detail and thought that the research team puts into analyzing each top charity’s funding gaps and identifying where a marginal dollar will have the largest impact. I’m convinced that the additional good associated with GiveWell being able to adapt to additional information and allocate my donation to the highest-impact charity we see when the grants are disbursed outweighs my desire to know where my donation will go ahead of time.

I also expect to allocate 5% of my year-end donation to helping factory farmed animals. This will be my first donation to an animal-focused charity, and it is a decision I went back and forth on. I believe that animals suffer, and I believe that I should act to alleviate that suffering; for example, by not eating animal products. Due to the scale of factory farming, the intensity of factory farming, and the neglectedness of the cause, I think it’s reasonable that interventions there might be orders of magnitude more cost-effective at averting the suffering of animals than GiveWell’s charities are at averting the suffering of humans. However, I’m very uncertain about how to compare helping animals to helping humans. I’m uncomfortable about the idea of allowing a human to suffer, even if I can alleviate the suffering of many animals with the same donation. I haven’t fully engaged with this discomfort yet, but I’m planning to make a donation targeted at helping animals this year to help me both clarify my own values and learn more about the effective animal advocacy space. I haven’t yet decided how to allocate this donation, but I expect that I’ll either donate to the Animal Welfare Fund through Effective Altruism Funds or through outsourcing the decision to a trusted friend who knows more about effective animal advocacy than I do.

Amar Radia

This year, I plan to give 75% of my donations to GiveWell to allocate at its discretion. I believe that this will ensure that my donations go the furthest in global health and development. In previous years, I have given to either one of GiveWell’s top charities, or to the Global Health Effective Altruism fund. This year, my greater understanding of the advantages in allowing my donations to be channelled at GiveWell’s discretion, coupled with my U.S. taxpayer status, have caused me to prefer to give to GiveWell for regranting.

I plan to give the remaining 25% of my donations to an organization working on animal welfare but have not yet decided which one. It will likely be one of Animal Charity Evaluators top charities, and I expect to rely on the advice of a friend who has thought about effective animal charities far more than I have. I also considered giving some money to organizations focusing on the long-term future, but my view is that these organizations are not funding constrained.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ See our staff giving posts from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. 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 Staff members’ personal donations for giving season 2018 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

For this post, GiveWell staff members wrote up the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We made similar posts in previous years.1See our staff giving posts from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. 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] }); Staff are listed in order of their start dates at GiveWell.

You can click the below links to jump to a staff member’s entry:

• Elie Hassenfeld
• Natalie Crispin
• Josh Rosenberg
• Devin Jacob
• Catherine Hollander
• Andrew Martin
• Christian Smith
• Isabel Arjmand
• James Snowden
• Dan Brown
• Olivia Larsen
• Amar Radia

Elie Hassenfeld

This year, I’m planning to donate to GiveWell for granting to top charities at its discretion.

I feel the same way I did last year, when I wrote, “GiveWell is currently producing the highest-quality research it ever has, which has led to more thoroughly researched, higher-quality recommendations that have been compared to more potential alternatives than ever before.”

I asked Holden Karnofsky, GiveWell’s co-founder, whether he thought there were promising opportunities for individuals with long-termist views; after checking with him, I believed that the Open Philanthropy Project and other donors were covering most of the opportunities I would find most promising.

I also considered giving to animal welfare organizations. I looked briefly at Animal Charity Evaluators’ research but ultimately didn’t feel like I had enough time to think through how their recommendations compared to giving to GiveWell, so I defaulted to GiveWell. I hope to give this more consideration in the future.

Natalie Crispin

I will be giving my annual gift to GiveWell for granting at its discretion to top charities. We expect that all of our top charities will be constrained by funding in the next year and that several will have unfunded opportunities to spend funds in highly cost-effective ways (at least 5 times as cost-effective as cash transfers). Our current best guess is that GiveWell will grant the funds it receives for granting at its discretion to Malaria Consortium, which would allow it to expand its work preventing child deaths from malaria in Nigeria or other countries. There is also a possibility that we will identify an opportunity that is more cost-effective than how Malaria Consortium would use funding at the current margin. Over the next few months, we will be discussing with our top charities how they plan to use funding from Good Ventures and other funders and what that means for how they would use additional funding. Giving to GiveWell for granting at its discretion allows for flexibility to take advantage of those opportunities.

I am very grateful for all the work, thoughtfulness, and hours of debate that my colleagues put into GiveWell’s recommendations this year. I am excited to support the most effective charities I know of.

Josh Rosenberg

I’m planning to give the same way that I did last year:

• 80% to GiveWell for granting at its discretion to top charities. GiveWell’s top charities are the most cost-effective ways to help people that I know of. I see Malaria Consortium’s work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention (the current default option for discretionary funding) as a robust and highly effective giving opportunity.
• 10% to animal welfare charities. I believe that animal welfare is a particularly important and neglected problem.
• 10% to long-term future-oriented causes. I have not yet chosen a donation target in this cause area. If I do not find an opportunity I am satisfied with after a small amount of additional research, I will enter this portion of my giving into a donor lottery.

I focused most of my giving on global health and development since GiveWell’s top charities have the most pressing funding gaps I am aware of. If I knew of an especially strong case for a particular giving opportunity in another cause area, I would be open to changing my allocation in the future.

Devin Jacob

I plan on making approximately 80% of my charitable donations in 2018 to GiveWell, with 100% of that money allocated to GiveDirectly. Compared to my colleagues at GiveWell, I value near-term improvements in material well-being more than I value reducing deaths. Donating to GiveDirectly is the best means of supporting this goal that I know of.

I struggle each year when attempting to assess whether I should bet on the possible long-term income effects of deworming. To date I have been unable to convince myself I should make this bet, even though I find little to argue with in our work on the expected value of donations to charities implementing deworming programs. I am making a decision to ignore the difference in expected value between a donation to a deworming charity and a donation to GiveDirectly due to the greater certainty of impact via the latter. I think my approach to charitable giving is conservative relative to other staff at GiveWell and many of our donors but I also think that my approach is reasonable given my specific ethical commitments.

I also support other organizations with gifts each year. This year, approximately 10-15% of my giving will go to organizations that do not meet GiveWell’s criteria. These organizations work in a number of areas including:

• Immigration policy, activism, and legal aid – International Refugee Assistance Project, RAICES, and the National Immigration Law Center
• Nonprofit news – primarily CALmatters, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica
• Local issues I care about such as transit infrastructure – eg, Bike East Bay
• Other political causes

I choose to keep the political contributions I make private as some of the causes I support are controversial and I would not want my political beliefs to have any potential impact on GiveWell’s work.

In the course of my day-to-day work duties at GiveWell, I also frequently make small donations to our charities when testing various payment platforms. To date, these donations account for approximately 5-10% of my remaining planned gifts in 2018. These gifts are distributed among our recommended and standout charities haphazardly. I could refund these transactions, but choose not to do that as I think all of our recommended charities do excellent work and I am happy to support them.

Catherine Hollander

I plan to give 75% of my total charitable giving to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. I value averting deaths quite highly and I believe, based on GiveWell’s assessment, that contributing toward filling Malaria Consortium’s funding gap will accomplish a lot of good in the world. In previous years (2017, 2016, and 2015), the majority of my gift has been directed to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), but I believe Malaria Consortium currently has a more pressing funding gap for its seasonal malaria chemoprevention work.

I plan to give 10% of my total giving to AMF to continue their work. I understand that giving predictably is helpful for organizations’ planning and I don’t wish to abruptly alter my support for AMF. I also think that AMF continues to represent an outstanding giving opportunity as one of GiveWell’s top charities.

I plan to give 5% of my total giving to StrongMinds, an organization focused on treating depression in Africa. I have not vetted this organization anywhere nearly as closely as GiveWell’s top charities have been vetted, though I understand that a number of people in the effective altruism community have a positive view of StrongMinds within the cause area of mental health (though I don’t have any reason to think it is more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities). Intuitively, I believe mental health is an important cause area for donors to consider, and although we do not have GiveWell recommendations in this space, I would like to learn more about this area by making a relatively small donation to an organization that focuses on it.

I plan to give the remaining 10% of my charitable giving this year in conjunction with my partner to an organization working on criminal justice reform in the United States. We are going to discuss and review organizations together between now and the end of the year and make a joint gift in this space. I plan to consult previous recommendations made by Open Philanthropy Project’s program officer focused on criminal justice reform, Chloe Cockburn, as well as checking with friends who are better informed of the needs in this space than I am.

Andrew Martin

I think there’s a strong case for donating to GiveWell to grant to top charities at its discretion this year.

Our top charities have substantial funding gaps for highly cost-effective programs, even after taking the $63.2 million that we’ve recommended that Good Ventures allocate between our top charities into account. These funding gaps include expanding Malaria Consortium’s work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Nigeria, Chad, and Burkina Faso, extending HKI’s vitamin A supplementation programs in several countries over the next three years, and extending Deworm the World’s programs in Pakistan and Nigeria.

As Natalie and James have noted, it seems likely that donations given to GiveWell at the end of 2018 to allocate at its discretion will be directed to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program. I’m planning to donate to GiveWell to allocate at its discretion because I expect that GiveWell will either direct those funds to Malaria Consortium or to another funding gap it judges to be even more valuable to fill.

Christian Smith

I’m planning to make my year-end donation to Malaria Consortium for its seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program. As my colleagues have mentioned, Malaria Consortium appears to be in a great position for scaling up a highly-effective intervention in areas with substantial malaria burdens.

I decided not to give to GiveWell for granting at its discretion because I think there’s a chance GiveWell will decide deworming programs look more worthwhile than SMC on the margin. I take a more skeptical stance than most of my colleagues on the value of deworming programs. While I’m not confident, I would guess that our process for modeling the value of deworming relative to malaria prevention puts deworming in too favorable a light.

Isabel Arjmand

My giving this year looks very similar to last year’s. It’s important to me for the bulk of my giving to go to organizations where I’m confident that my donation will have a substantial impact, and I don’t know of any giving opportunities in that vein that are as strong as GiveWell’s top charities. Each year I also give to a handful of other organizations, some in international development and others operating in the United States. I intend each of those donations to be large enough to be meaningful to me and to signal support for these programs, while still leaving the vast majority for GiveWell-recommended charities. In all, 80% of my charitable budget is going to GiveWell’s top charities and 20% to other causes, which is the same as my donation last year.

I’m giving 75% of my total year-end donation to grants to recommended charities at GiveWell’s discretion. I strongly considered designating my donation to Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program instead. I’m very excited about Malaria Consortium’s opportunity to provide SMC in Nigeria; I’ve been particularly impressed by Malaria Consortium as an organization over the past year; and I have more confidence in SMC as an intervention than I do in some others. It’s hard for me to imagine preferring for my donation to go elsewhere when it’s time for GiveWell to grant out its discretionary funding from the fourth quarter of 2018. But, I believe that if GiveWell does decide to give the next round of discretionary funding elsewhere, I’m more likely than not to agree with that decision. I hold this belief in part because my moral weights and overall outputs in our cost-effectiveness analysis are quite similar to the median staff member, and while I’m concerned about the evidence for deworming, I think that concern is adequately reflected in my cost-effectiveness analysis inputs.

An additional 5% of my donation will go to GiveDirectly. I look forward to continuing to follow the work they do, particularly their cash benchmarking project, their work with refugees, and their continual research to improve the effectiveness of their programs.

I plan to distribute the remaining 20% of my donation across the following organizations:

• International Refugee Assistance Project, which advocates for refugees and displaced people with a focus on those from the Middle East.
• StrongMinds, which is the most promising organization I know of focused on mental health in low- and middle-income countries.
• Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which takes a comprehensive, intersectional view of women’s health and reproductive justice.
• Cool Earth, which works with local communities to protect rainforests and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

As I wrote last year, I’d be somewhat surprised if these organizations were competitively cost-effective with GiveWell’s top charities, and I haven’t vetted them with an intensity that comes anywhere close to the rigor of GiveWell evaluations. I choose to support these programs in order to promote more justice-focused causes, further my own civic engagement, and signal support for work I think is important.

I also make small donations throughout the year to grassroots organizations working in the Bay Area like Causa Justa :: Just Cause, Initiate Justice, and the Sogorea Te Land Trust. These donations, which are motivated primarily by community engagement and relationship-building, come out of my personal discretionary spending, rather than what I budget for charitable giving.

As always, I’m grateful for the thoughtfulness of my colleagues, the work that went into producing this year’s recommendations, and the conversations we’ve had that have informed my own giving.

James Snowden

I’m planning to donate to GiveWell for allocating funds at its discretion because (i) I prefer GiveWell to have the flexibility to react to new information, and (ii) in the absence of new information, I expect additional funds will be allocated to Malaria Consortium, the charity I would have given to. I expect Malaria Consortium would use those funds to scale up seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso. According to the Global Burden of Disease, Nigeria has the most deaths from malaria of any country, and Burkina Faso has the highest rate of deaths from malaria given its population size. This drives my view that donations to Malaria Consortium are likely to be more cost-effective than donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, which sometimes distributes nets in countries with a lower malaria burden.

I may also continue to give a smaller proportion of my donations to organizations working on improving animal welfare, and focused on the long-term future, but haven’t yet decided whether to do so, or where to give.

Dan Brown

I will give 75% of my 2018 charity donation to GiveWell to allocate to recommended charities at its discretion. This is my first year working for GiveWell and I’ve been very impressed with the quality of work that goes into our recommendations. My moral values seem to be quite close to the median values across staff members in our cost-effectiveness analysis, and so I see no reason to deviate from GiveWell’s choice on that basis. As Natalie and James note, our best guess is that these funds will be allocated to Malaria Consortium to scale up its seasonal malaria chemoprevention programs.

I will give 15% of my donation to No Means No Worldwide, a global rape prevention organisation. I spent a reasonable amount of time during my PhD researching gender based violence. This encouraged me to donate to an organisation tackling sexual violence, particularly because the frequency of sexual violence globally is staggering. I have not vetted No Means No Worldwide with anything like the rigor of a GiveWell evaluation, but I have been impressed by what I have read so far (e.g. they are evaluating their program using RCTs, and I like that part of their approach is to promote positive masculinity amongst boys).

I will give 6% of my donation to Stonewall (UK), an organisation tackling discrimination against LGBT people. Whilst I have focused most of my donation on global health and development, I would also like to support a more justice-focused cause. I have fairly limited information with which to choose amongst charities in this area as I’m not aware of a GiveWell-type organisation to help direct my donation. However, I would like to see more done to tackle homophobia in sport, and the main organisation I am aware of that has tried to do this is Stonewall (UK) (through its Rainbow Laces campaign).

I will give the remaining 4% of my donation to Afrinspire. I have donated to this charity for a number of years. To my knowledge, the money I donate is used to help pay for school costs for orphaned children in Kampala (through the Jaguza Initiative). I do not expect this to be as cost-effective as other charitable giving opportunities, but I do not think it would be responsible to unexpectedly decrease this donation now that I am paying more attention personally to cost-effectiveness.

Olivia Larsen

This year, I plan to give 95% of my year-end donation to GiveWell for granting at its discretion. This is my first year working at GiveWell full-time, and it will be my first time contributing to GiveWell’s discretionary fund.

In previous years, I have chosen to support specific top charities among GiveWell’s recommendations. Knowing which charity I was supporting in advance of my donation helped me more clearly conceptualize the impact I was making. Since starting at GiveWell, however, I’ve seen the level of detail and thought that the research team puts into analyzing each top charity’s funding gaps and identifying where a marginal dollar will have the largest impact. I’m convinced that the additional good associated with GiveWell being able to adapt to additional information and allocate my donation to the highest-impact charity we see when the grants are disbursed outweighs my desire to know where my donation will go ahead of time.

I also expect to allocate 5% of my year-end donation to helping factory farmed animals. This will be my first donation to an animal-focused charity, and it is a decision I went back and forth on. I believe that animals suffer, and I believe that I should act to alleviate that suffering; for example, by not eating animal products. Due to the scale of factory farming, the intensity of factory farming, and the neglectedness of the cause, I think it’s reasonable that interventions there might be orders of magnitude more cost-effective at averting the suffering of animals than GiveWell’s charities are at averting the suffering of humans. However, I’m very uncertain about how to compare helping animals to helping humans. I’m uncomfortable about the idea of allowing a human to suffer, even if I can alleviate the suffering of many animals with the same donation. I haven’t fully engaged with this discomfort yet, but I’m planning to make a donation targeted at helping animals this year to help me both clarify my own values and learn more about the effective animal advocacy space. I haven’t yet decided how to allocate this donation, but I expect that I’ll either donate to the Animal Welfare Fund through Effective Altruism Funds or through outsourcing the decision to a trusted friend who knows more about effective animal advocacy than I do.

Amar Radia

This year, I plan to give 75% of my donations to GiveWell to allocate at its discretion. I believe that this will ensure that my donations go the furthest in global health and development. In previous years, I have given to either one of GiveWell’s top charities, or to the Global Health Effective Altruism fund. This year, my greater understanding of the advantages in allowing my donations to be channelled at GiveWell’s discretion, coupled with my U.S. taxpayer status, have caused me to prefer to give to GiveWell for regranting.

I plan to give the remaining 25% of my donations to an organization working on animal welfare but have not yet decided which one. It will likely be one of Animal Charity Evaluators top charities, and I expect to rely on the advice of a friend who has thought about effective animal charities far more than I have. I also considered giving some money to organizations focusing on the long-term future, but my view is that these organizations are not funding constrained.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ See our staff giving posts from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013. 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 Staff members’ personal donations for giving season 2018 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’ve updated our donations processing to better meet the needs of those who want to give via cryptocurrencies. Last year, after we began to accept Bitcoin, we received over $290,000 in Bitcoin donations.

By allowing more types of cryptocurrency donations, we’re enabling donors to realize tax deductions and to contribute more funding to their chosen charity based on gains in the cryptocurrencies they hold.

We’re now accepting donations in the following cryptocurrencies:

• Bitcoin (BTC)
• Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
• Ethereum (ETH)
• Ethereum Classic (ETC)
• Litecoin (LTC)
• 0x (ZRX)

We’ve built different pages for donating based on where you’d like to direct your support. To donate cryptocurrency, click the option you prefer:

• Donate cryptocurrencies to our top charities
• Donate cryptocurrencies to our standout charities
• Donate cryptocurrencies to GiveWell’s operating expenses

If you have any questions or would like to donate in a currency not listed above, please reach out to us at donations@givewell.org.

If you have questions about the different options for directing your donation (top charities, standout charities, or operating expenses), please let us know.

The post We’ve added more options for cryptocurrency donors appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’ve updated our donations processing to better meet the needs of those who want to give via cryptocurrencies. Last year, after we began to accept Bitcoin, we received over $290,000 in Bitcoin donations.

By allowing more types of cryptocurrency donations, we’re enabling donors to realize tax deductions and to contribute more funding to their chosen charity based on gains in the cryptocurrencies they hold.

We’re now accepting donations in the following cryptocurrencies:

• Bitcoin (BTC)
• Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
• Ethereum (ETH)
• Ethereum Classic (ETC)
• Litecoin (LTC)
• 0x (ZRX)

We’ve built different pages for donating based on where you’d like to direct your support. To donate cryptocurrency, click the option you prefer:

• Donate cryptocurrencies to our top charities
• Donate cryptocurrencies to our standout charities
• Donate cryptocurrencies to GiveWell’s operating expenses

If you have any questions or would like to donate in a currency not listed above, please reach out to us at donations@givewell.org.

If you have questions about the different options for directing your donation (top charities, standout charities, or operating expenses), please let us know.

The post We’ve added more options for cryptocurrency donors appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Last week, we published an updated analysis on “spillover” effects of GiveDirectly‘s cash transfer program: i.e., effects that cash transfers may have on people who don’t receive cash transfers but who live nearby those who do receive cash transfers.1For more context on this topic, see our May 2018 blog post. 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] }); We concluded: “[O]ur best guess is that negative or positive spillover effects of cash are minimal on net.” (More)

Economist Berk Özler posted a series of tweets expressing concern over GiveWell’s research process for this report. We understood his major questions to be:

1. Why did GiveWell publish its analysis on spillover effects before a key study it relied on was public? Is this consistent with GiveWell’s commitment to transparency? Has GiveWell done this in other cases?
2. Why did GiveWell place little weight on some papers in its analysis of spillover effects?
3. Why did GiveWell’s analysis of spillovers focus on effects on consumption? Does this imply that GiveWell does not value effects on other outcomes?

These questions apply to GiveWell’s research process generally, not just our spillovers analysis, so the discussion below addresses topics such as:

• When do our recommendations rely on private information, and why?
• How do we decide on which evidence to review in our analyses of charities’ impact?
• How do we decide which outcomes to include in our cost-effectiveness analyses?

Finally, this feedback led us to realize a communication mistake we made: our initial report did not communicate as clearly as it should have that we were specifically estimating spillovers of GiveDirectly’s current program, not commenting on spillovers of cash transfers in general. We will now revise the report to clarify this.

Note: It may be difficult to follow some of the details of this post without having read our report on the spillover effects of GiveDirectly’s cash transfers.

Summary

In brief, our responses to Özler’s questions are:

• Why did GiveWell publish its analysis on spillover effects before a key paper it relied on was public? One of our major goals is to allocate money to charities as effectively as possible. Sometimes, research we learn about cannot yet be made public but we believe it should affect our recommendations. In these cases, we incorporate the private information into our recommendations and we are explicit about how it is affecting our views. We expect that private results may be more likely to change but nonetheless believe that they contain useful information; we believe ignoring such results because they are private would lead us to reach less accurate conclusions. For another recent example of an important conclusion that relied on private results, see our update on the preliminary (private) results from a study on No Lean Season, which was key to the decision to remove No Lean Season as a top charity in 2018. We discuss other examples below.
• Why did GiveWell place little weight on some papers in its analysis of spillover effects? In general, our analyses aim to estimate the impact of programs as implemented by particular charities. The goal of our spillovers analysis is to make our best guess about the size of spillover effects caused by GiveDirectly’s programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. We are not trying to communicate an opinion on the size of spillover effects of cash transfers in other countries or in development economics more broadly. Therefore, our analysis places substantially more weight on studies that are most similar to GiveDirectly’s program on basic characteristics such as geographic location and program type. Correspondingly, we place little weight on papers that do not meet these criteria. However, we’d welcome additional information that would help us improve our future decisionmaking about which papers to put the most weight on in our analyses.
• Why did GiveWell’s analysis of spillovers focus on effects on consumption? Our cost-effectiveness models focus on key outcomes that we expect to drive the bulk of the welfare effects of a program. In the case of our spillovers analysis, we believe the two most relevant outcomes for estimating spillover effects on welfare are consumption and subjective well-being. We chose to focus on consumption effects in large part because (a) this is consistent with how we model the impacts of other programs, such as deworming, and (b) distinguishing effects on subjective well-being from effects on consumption in a way that avoids double-counting benefits was too complex to do in the time we had available. It is possible that additional work on subjective well-being measures would meaningfully change how we assess benefits of programs (for this program and potentially others). This is a question we plan to return to in the future.

As noted above, our current best guess is that negative or positive spillover effects of GiveDirectly’s cash transfers are minimal on net. However, we emphasize that our conclusion at this point is very tentative, and we hope to update our views next year if there is more public discussion or research on the areas of uncertainty highlighted in our analysis and/or if public debate about the studies covered in our report raises major issues we had not previously considered.

Details follow.

Why did GiveWell publish its analysis on spillover effects before a key paper it relied on was public?

In our analysis of the spillover effects of GiveDirectly’s cash transfer program, we place substantial weight on GiveDirectly’s “general equilibrium” (GE) study (as we noted we would do in May 2018,2“We plan to reassess the cash transfer evidence base and provide our updated conclusions in the next several months (by November 2018 at the latest). One reason that we do not plan to provide a comprehensive update sooner is that we expect upcoming midline results from GiveDirectly’s “general equilibrium” study, a large and high-quality study explicitly designed to estimate spillover effects, will play a major role in our conclusions. Results from this study are expected to be released in the next few months.” (More.) 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] }); prior to seeing the study’s results) because:

• it is the study with the largest sample size,
• its methodology was designed to estimate both across-village and within-village spillover effects, and
• it is a direct study of a version of GiveDirectly’s program.

The details of this study are currently private, though we were able to share the headline results and methodology when we published our report.

This represents one example of a general policy we follow, which is to be willing to compromise to some degree on transparency in order to use the best information available to us to improve the quality of our recommendations. More on the reasoning behind this policy:

• Since our recommendations affect the allocation of over $100 million each year, the value of improving our recommendations by factoring in the best information (even if private) can be high. Every November we publish updates to our recommended charities so that donors giving in December and January (when the bulk of charitable giving occurs) can act on the most up-to-date information.
• We have ongoing communications with charities and researchers to learn about new information that could affect our recommendations. Private information (both positive and negative) has been important to our views on a number of occasions. Beyond the example of our spillovers analysis, early private results were key to our views on topics including:
  • No Lean Season in 2018 (negative result)3“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.” (More.) 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] });
  • Deworming in 2017 (positive result)4“We have seen preliminary, confidential results from a 15-year follow-up to Miguel and Kremer 2004. We are not yet able to discuss the results in detail, but they are broadly consistent with the findings from the 10-year follow-up analyzed in Baird et al. 2016.” (More.) 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] });
  • Insecticide resistance in 2016 (modeling study)5“We have seen two modeling studies which model clinical malaria outcomes in areas with ITN coverage for different levels of resistance based on experimental hut trial data. Of these two studies, the most recent study we have seen is unpublished (it was shared with us privately), but we prefer it because the insecticide resistance data it draws from is more recent and more comprehensive.” (More.) 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] });
  • Development Media International in 2015 (negative result)6“The preliminary endline results did not find any effect of DMI’s program on child mortality (it was powered to detect a reduction of 15% or more), and it found substantially less effect on behavior change than was found at midline. We cannot publicly discuss the details of the endline results we have seen, because they are not yet finalised and because the finalised results will be embargoed prior to publication, but we have informally incorporated the results into our view of DMI’s program effectiveness.” (More.) jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_6").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_6", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });
  • Living Goods in 2014 (positive result)7“The researchers have published an abstract on the study, and shared a more in-depth report with us. The more in-depth report is not yet cleared for publication because the authors are seeking publication in an academic journal.” (More.) jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_7").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_7", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });
• Note that in all of the above cases we worked with the relevant researchers to get permission to publicly share basic information about the results we were relying on, as we did in the case of the GE study.
• In all cases, we expected that full results would be made public in the future. Our understanding is that oftentimes early headline results from studies can be shared publicly while it may take substantially longer to publicly release full working papers because working papers are time-intensive to produce. We would be more hesitant to rely on a study that has been private for an unusually long period of time unless there were a good reason for it.
• However, relying on private studies conflicts to some extent with our goal to be transparent. In particular, we believe two major downsides of our policy with respect to private information are (a) early private results are more likely to contain errors, and (b) we are not able to benefit from public scrutiny and discussion of the research. We would have ideally seen a robust public discussion of the GE study before we released our recommendations in November, but the timeline for the public release of GE study results did not allow that. We look forward to closely following the public debate in the future and plan to update our views based on what we learn.
• Despite these limitations, we have generally found early, private results to be predictive of final, public results. This, combined with the fact that we believe private results have improved our recommendations on a number of occasions, leads us to believe that the benefits of our current policy on using private information outweigh the costs.

A few other notes:

• Although we provide a number of cases above in which we relied on private information, the vast majority of the key information we rely on for our charity recommendations is public.
• When private information is shared with us that implies a positive update about a charity’s program, we try to be especially attentive about potential conflicts of interest. In this case, there is potential for concern because the GE study was co-authored by Paul Niehaus, Chairman of GiveDirectly. We chose not to substantially limit the weight we place on the GE study because (a) a detailed pre-analysis plan was submitted for this study, and (b) three of the four co-authors (Ted Miguel, Johannes Haushofer, and Michael Walker) do not have an affiliation with GiveDirectly. We have no reason to believe that GiveDirectly’s involvement altered the analysis undertaken. In addition, the GE study team informed us that Paul Niehaus recused himself from final decisions about what the team communicated to GiveWell.
• When we published our report (about one week ago), we expected that some additional analysis from the GE study would be shared publicly soon (which we still expect). We do not yet have an exact date and do not know precisely what content will be shared (though we expect it to be similar to what was shared with us privately).

Why did GiveWell place little weight on some papers in its analysis of spillover effects?

Some general context on GiveWell’s research that we think is useful for understanding our approach in this case is:

• We are typically estimating the impact of programs as implemented by particular charities, not aiming to publish formal meta-analyses about program areas as a whole. As noted above, we believe we should have communicated more clearly about this in our original report on spillovers and we will revise the report to clarify.
• We focus our limited time on the research that we think is most likely to affect our decisions, so our style of analysis is often different from what is typically seen in academia. (We think the differences in the kind of work we do is captured well by a relevant Rachel Glennerster blog post.)

Consistent with the above, the goal of our spillovers analysis was to make a best guess for the size of the spillover effect of GiveDirectly’s (GD’s) program in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda specifically.8This program provides $1,000 unconditional transfers and treats almost all households within target villages in Kenya and Uganda (though still treats only eligible households in Rwanda). jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_8").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_8", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); We are not trying to communicate an opinion on the size of spillover effects of cash transfers in other countries or development economics more broadly. If we were trying to do the latter, we would have considered a much wider range of literature.

We expect that studies that are most similar to GD’s program on basic characteristics such as geographic location and program type will be most useful for predicting spillovers in the GD context. So, we prioritize looking at studies that 1) took place in sub-Saharan Africa, and 2) evaluate unconditional cash transfer programs (further explanation in footnote).9On (1): Our understanding is that the nature and size of spillover effects is likely to be highly dependent on the context studied, for example because the extent to which village economies are integrated might differ substantially across contexts (e.g. how close households are to larger markets outside of the village in which they live, how easily goods can be transported, etc.).
On (2): We expect that providing cash transfers conditional on behavioral choices is a fairly different intervention from providing unconditional cash transfers, and so may have different spillover effects. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_9").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_9", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); We would welcome additional engagement on this topic: that is, (a) to what extent should we believe that effects estimated in studies not meeting these criteria would apply to GD’s cash transfer programs, and (b) are there other criteria that we should have used?

A further factor that causes us to put more weight on the five studies we chose to review deeply is that they all study transfers distributed by GD, which we see as increasing their relevance to GD’s current work (though the specifics of the programs that were studied vary from GD’s current program). We believe that studies that do not meet the above criteria could affect our views on spillovers of GD’s program to some extent, but they would receive lower weight in our conclusions since they are less directly relevant to GD’s program.

We saw further review of studies that did not meet the above criteria as lower priority than a number of other analyses that we think would be more likely to shift our bottom line estimate of the spillovers of GD’s program. Even though we focused on the subset of studies most relevant to GD’s program, we were not able to combine their results to create a reasonable explicit model of spillover effects because we found that key questions were not answered by the available data (our attempt at an explicit model is in the following footnote).10We tried to create such an explicit model here (explanation here). jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_10").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_10", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); One fundamental challenge is that we are trying to apply estimates of “within-village” spillover effects to predict across-village spillover effects.11GiveDirectly treats almost all households within target villages in Kenya and Uganda (though still treats only eligible households in Rwanda). jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_11").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_11", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); Additional complications are described here.

More on why we placed little weight on particular studies that Özler highlighted in his comments:12Note on terminology: In our spillovers analysis report, we talk about studies in terms of “inclusion” and “exclusion.” We may use the term “exclude” differently than it is sometimes used in, e.g., academic meta-analyses. When we say that we have excluded studies, we have typically lightly reviewed their results and placed little weight on them in our conclusions. We did not ignore them entirely, as may happen for papers excluded from an academic meta-analysis. To try to clarify this, in this blog post we have used the term “place little weight.” We will try to be attentive to this in future research that we publish. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_12").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_12", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });

• We placed little weight on the following papers in our initial analysis for the reasons given in parentheses: Angelucci & DiGiorgi 2009 (conditional transfers, study took place in Mexico), Cunha et al. 2017 (study took place in Mexico), Filmer et al. 2018 (conditional transfers, study took place in the Philippines), and Baird, de Hoop, and Özler 2013 (mix of conditional and unconditional transfers).
• In addition, the estimates of mental health effects on teenage schoolgirls in Baird, de Hoop, and Özler 2013 seem like they would be relatively less useful for predicting the impacts of spillovers from cash transfers given to households, particularly in villages where almost all households receive transfers as is often the case in GD’s program.13We expect that local spillover effects via psychological mechanisms are less likely to occur with the current spatial distribution of GD’s program. In GD’s program in Kenya and Uganda, almost all households are treated within its target villages. In addition, the majority of villages within a region are treated in a block. Baird, de Hoop, and Özler 2013 estimate spillover effects within enumeration areas (groups of several villages), and the authors believe that the “detrimental effects on the mental well-being of those randomly excluded from the program in intervention areas is consistent with the idea that an individual’s utility depends on her relative consumption (or income or status) within her peer group”, p.372. The spatial distribution of GD’s program in Kenya and Uganda makes it more likely that the majority of one’s local peer group receives the same treatment assignment. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_13").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_13", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });

Why did GiveWell’s analysis of spillovers focus on effects on consumption? Does this imply that GiveWell does not value effects on other outcomes?

Some general context on GiveWell’s research that we think is useful for understanding our approach in this case is:

• When modeling the cost-effectiveness of any program, there are typically a large number of outcomes that could be included in the model. In our analyses, we focus on the key outcomes that we expect to drive the bulk of the welfare effects of a program.
• For example, our core cost-effectiveness model primarily considers various programs’ effects on averting deaths and increasing consumption (either immediately or later in life). This means that, e.g., we do not include benefits of averting vision impairment in our cost-effectiveness model for vitamin A supplementation (in part because we expect those effects to be relatively small as a portion of the overall impact of the program).
• This does not mean that we think excluded outcomes are unimportant. We focus on the largest impacts of programs because (a) we think they are a good proxy for the overall impact of the relevant programs, and (b) having fewer outcomes simplifies our analysis, which leads to less potential for error, better comparability between programs, and a more manageable time investment in modeling.
• For a deeper assessment of which program impacts we include and exclude from our core cost-effectiveness model and why, see our model’s “Inclusion/exclusion” sheet.14We have not yet added it, but we plan to add “Subjective well-being” under the list of outcomes excluded in the “Cross-cutting / Structural” section of the sheet, since it may be relevant to all programs. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_14").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_14", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] }); We aim to include outcomes that can be justified by evidence, feasibly modeled, and are consistent with how we handle other program outcomes. We revisit our list of excluded outcomes periodically to assess whether such outcomes could lead to a major shift in our cost-effectiveness estimate for a particular program.

In our spillovers analysis, we applied the above principles to try to identify the key welfare effects. Among the main five studies we reviewed on spillovers, it seems like the two most relevant outcomes are consumption and subjective well-being. We chose to focus on consumption for the following reasons:

• Assessing the effects of cash transfers on consumption (rather than subjective well-being) is consistent with how we model the welfare effects of other programs that we think increase consumption on expectation, such as deworming.
• Distinguishing effects on subjective well-being from effects on consumption in order to avoid double-counting benefits was too complex to do in the time we had available. It seems intuitively likely that standards of living (proxied by consumption) affect subjective well-being. In the Haushofer and Shapiro studies and in the GE study, the spillover effects act in the same direction for both consumption and subjective well-being. We do not think it would be appropriate to simply add subjective well-being effects into our model over and above effects on consumption since that risks double-counting benefits.
• We do not have a strong argument that consumption is a more robust proxy for “true well-being” than subjective well-being, but given that consumption effects can be more easily compared across our programs we have chosen it as the default option at this point.

We hope to broadly revisit in the future whether we should be placing more weight on measures of subjective well-being across programs. It is possible that additional work on subjective well-being measures would meaningfully change how we assess benefits of programs (for this program and potentially others).

Examples of our questions about how to interpret subjective well-being effects in the cash spillovers literature include:

• In the Haushofer and Shapiro studies, how should we interpret each of the underlying components of the subjective well-being indices? For example, how does self-reported life satisfaction map onto utility versus self-reported happiness?
• In Haushofer, Reisinger, & Shapiro 2015, there is a statistically significant negative spillover effect on life-satisfaction, but there are no statistically significant effects on happiness, depression, stress, cortisol levels or the overall subjective well-being index (column (4) of Table 1). How should we interpret these findings?

Next steps

• We hope that there is more public discussion on some of the policy-relevant questions we highlighted in our report and on the other points of uncertainty highlighted throughout this post. Our conclusions on spillovers are very tentative and could be affected substantially by more analysis, so we would greatly appreciate any feedback or pointers to relevant work.15If you are aware of relevant analyses or studies that we have not covered here, please let us know at info@givewell.org. jQuery("#footnote_plugin_tooltip_15").tooltip({ tip: "#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_15", tipClass: "footnote_tooltip", effect: "fade", fadeOutSpeed: 100, predelay: 400, position: "top right", relative: true, offset: [10, 10] });
• We are planning to follow up with Dr. Özler to better understand his views on spillover effects of cash transfers. We have appreciated his previous blog posts on this topic and want to ensure we are getting multiple perspectives on the relevant issues.

Notes   [ + ]

1. ↑ For more context on this topic, see our May 2018 blog post. 2. ↑ “We plan to reassess the cash transfer evidence base and provide our updated conclusions in the next several months (by November 2018 at the latest). One reason that we do not plan to provide a comprehensive update sooner is that we expect upcoming midline results from GiveDirectly’s “general equilibrium” study, a large and high-quality study explicitly designed to estimate spillover effects, will play a major role in our conclusions. Results from this study are expected to be released in the next few months.” (More.) 3. ↑ “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.” (More.) 4. ↑ “We have seen preliminary, confidential results from a 15-year follow-up to Miguel and Kremer 2004. We are not yet able to discuss the results in detail, but they are broadly consistent with the findings from the 10-year follow-up analyzed in Baird et al. 2016.” (More.) 5. ↑ “We have seen two modeling studies which model clinical malaria outcomes in areas with ITN coverage for different levels of resistance based on experimental hut trial data. Of these two studies, the most recent study we have seen is unpublished (it was shared with us privately), but we prefer it because the insecticide resistance data it draws from is more recent and more comprehensive.” (More.) 6. ↑ “The preliminary endline results did not find any effect of DMI’s program on child mortality (it was powered to detect a reduction of 15% or more), and it found substantially less effect on behavior change than was found at midline. We cannot publicly discuss the details of the endline results we have seen, because they are not yet finalised and because the finalised results will be embargoed prior to publication, but we have informally incorporated the results into our view of DMI’s program effectiveness.” (More.) 7. ↑ “The researchers have published an abstract on the study, and shared a more in-depth report with us. The more in-depth report is not yet cleared for publication because the authors are seeking publication in an academic journal.” (More.) 8. ↑ This program provides $1,000 unconditional transfers and treats almost all households within target villages in Kenya and Uganda (though still treats only eligible households in Rwanda). 9. ↑ On (1): Our understanding is that the nature and size of spillover effects is likely to be highly dependent on the context studied, for example because the extent to which village economies are integrated might differ substantially across contexts (e.g. how close households are to larger markets outside of the village in which they live, how easily goods can be transported, etc.).
On (2): We expect that providing cash transfers conditional on behavioral choices is a fairly different intervention from providing unconditional cash transfers, and so may have different spillover effects. 10. ↑ We tried to create such an explicit model here (explanation here). 11. ↑ GiveDirectly treats almost all households within target villages in Kenya and Uganda (though still treats only eligible households in Rwanda). 12. ↑ Note on terminology: In our spillovers analysis report, we talk about studies in terms of “inclusion” and “exclusion.” We may use the term “exclude” differently than it is sometimes used in, e.g., academic meta-analyses. When we say that we have excluded studies, we have typically lightly reviewed their results and placed little weight on them in our conclusions. We did not ignore them entirely, as may happen for papers excluded from an academic meta-analysis. To try to clarify this, in this blog post we have used the term “place little weight.” We will try to be attentive to this in future research that we publish. 13. ↑ We expect that local spillover effects via psychological mechanisms are less likely to occur with the current spatial distribution of GD’s program. In GD’s program in Kenya and Uganda, almost all households are treated within its target villages. In addition, the majority of villages within a region are treated in a block. Baird, de Hoop, and Özler 2013 estimate spillover effects within enumeration areas (groups of several villages), and the authors believe that the “detrimental effects on the mental well-being of those randomly excluded from the program in intervention areas is consistent with the idea that an individual’s utility depends on her relative consumption (or income or status) within her peer group”, p.372. The spatial distribution of GD’s program in Kenya and Uganda makes it more likely that the majority of one’s local peer group receives the same treatment assignment. 14. ↑ We have not yet added it, but we plan to add “Subjective well-being” under the list of outcomes excluded in the “Cross-cutting / Structural” section of the sheet, since it may be relevant to all programs. 15. ↑ If you are aware of relevant analyses or studies that we have not covered here, please let us know at info@givewell.org. 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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