Our research to date on developing-world aid has identified it as an extremely promising area for donors, but one about which much more investigation is needed. For our findings to date, see our overview of developing-world aid.

GiveWell's top priority is currently finding donors who will commit to giving based on our research, through the mechanism of a GiveWell Pledge.

In our first year, our former coworkers funded us (see our story) to do our first round of research, demonstrating that our process can produce valuable information. Now we are looking to expand our donor base, and show that there is demand for the kind of information we provide - substantive information about what charities do and whether it works. Showing this demand is necessary in order to continue (and expand) our project, as well as to show charities that sharing information is worth their while. (For more on why this is our top priority, see our annual review and plan.)

A GiveWell Pledge is a formal, advance commitment to use our research. Over the next year, we will be focusing on identifying the most promising programs in developing-world aid (see the details of our research plan here); once we produce our recommendations, those who have made Pledges will give to the one that best fits their values.

• You will accomplish more with your charity. After several months of research, we will recommend the strongest charities we can find, publish public reviews on our website, and work with you to pick the organization that best accomplishes your philanthropic goals.
• You pay no fee to GiveWell. 100% of the funds you give will go to the recommended charity you choose.

If you are interested in making a GiveWell Pledge - or in connecting us to donors who may be - please fill out the form below:

Click here for this overview in PDF format.

In our first year, we evaluated charities that work in the poorest parts of the world, aiming to save lives and otherwise improve living conditions. We found that:

• Opportunities for a donor to help people are enormous, given the vast numbers of people who die (and otherwise suffer) from conditions that are relatively simple and inexpensive to correct. We believe that donors can accomplish far more donating to the developing-world organizations we recommend than they can through any developed-world program we know of.
• However, different programs and delivery methods vary widely in effectiveness and cost, and the most popular and marketable programs are not necessarily the best (or even effective at all).
• Population Services International stands out for its commitment to thorough, consistent self-monitoring and evaluation; by marketing life-saving and –improving materials such as condoms, bednets, and water purification kits, PSI appears to be improving quality of life with great cost-effectiveness.
• Partners in Health is another standout organization that builds comprehensive community health programs, staffing full-service hospitals and health centers with trained local staff. Unlike many international charities, which focus on a particular disease or problem at a time, PIH is notable for its emphasis on serving people’s needs holistically and turning no one away.
• Our first round of research has also made us aware of many approaches to developing-world aid that we consider high-potential, but need to research more carefully to have confidence in. We plan to research them more in the coming year.

Below are the highlights of what we learned. For more detail, see our reports on individual causes:

• Global health report
• Global poverty report

The problem

Every year, over 6 million people die of preventable causes in sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority of them are children under the age of 5.

(The data in the charts below comes from The Lancet's Global Health Network's series on child survival. All papers are available here. Data in the first chart below comes from Victora et al. 2003 and data for the second comes from Black et al. 2003.)

Potential solutions

Proven, effective interventions to prevent save lives in the developing world are often simple and inexpensive (Jones et al. 2003).

In many cases, these proven interventions are only sparsely implemented and could be expanded with well-directed donations.

(Data in the chart below comes from USAID’s Demographic and Health Surveys.)

The importance of strategic giving

The developing world presents enormous opportunities to help people, but also major challenges for charities and for donors. Cost-effectiveness of different approaches varies wildly, and the most popular and “marketable” interventions are not necessarily the most effective. The first chart on this page gives an example of this: projects to build wells, latrines, and other sanitation infrastructure have been estimated to be significantly more costly than other methods of improving hygiene and reducing hygiene-related deaths.

And even for fundamentally sound interventions, effectiveness can vary widely by area and approach (see, for example, the variations in bednet utilization seen in the second chart). For this reason, we find thorough and consistent monitoring to be essential.

(Data in the chart below comes from Varley et al. 1998.)

(Data in the chart below comes from USAID’s Demographic and Health Surveys.)

The difficulty of finding a well-documented organization

From our first year of research, one of our main findings is that most aid organizations conduct a huge variety of activities, and are unwilling or unable to share information about what they’re funding and whether it’s working. In evaluating large, household-name organizations, we were rarely able to get summaries of how much was being spent in each country (and on what activities), and we were even more rarely given information on how activities are progressing and what the impact on the nearby populations has been. We were generally told that information of this kind is sometimes available for specific projects, but that no organization-wide aggregation exists.

Two standout organizations

We’ve identified two organizations that stand out for their dedication to consistent, well-monitored, cost-effective activities that we can confidently say are improving health and saving lives. We feel they represent much better options for a donor than typical large-scale, diverse charities whose projects range all over the map.

Population Services International (PSI) sells and promotes products aimed at improving health and quality of life for people in the developing world. Rather than distributing these products for free, it charges below-market prices, reasoning that this practice improves the likelihood that its products will get to people who value them and are likely to use them.

PSI thoroughly tracks its activities, costs, and results throughout the world. The below table gives a sample of just how inexpensively its activities can make a real difference; for more detail, see our full report here.

Partners in Health takes a different approach: it runs comprehensive community health programs, staffing full-service hospitals and health centers with trained local staff. While we don’t believe this approach is as “cost-effective” as mass distribution of materials, we still think it could be saving a human life for every ~$3500, with the added benefit of training local staff and thereby improving an area’s long-term health care capacity. We also believe that this approach stands out from other programs because of its emphasis on serving people’s needs holistically, rather than narrowly targeting specific diseases. For more detail, see our full report here.

More to come

In our first year of research, we have found that the developing world presents enormous opportunities for a donor, and thoroughly evaluated two standout organizations; but we have also raised more questions than we’ve answered about the diverse problems people face, and the diverse solutions that different charities offer. In the coming year, we hope to research the following issues, which we covered only superficially in our first year:

• Disaster-related relief and reconstruction. Recent tragedies in Myanmar and China have created needs that are both urgent and ongoing. We hope to explore the complex context of these needs – we are particularly sensitive to political complications in these two countries – and determine how much good a well-directed donation can accomplish.
  
• Malnutrition-centered programs. We believe that malnutrition is extremely widespread in the developing world, and is strongly connected to other health and economic problems, but that many food aid programs could be doing more harm than good. A good malnutrition program could make enormous and highly cost-effective differences in quality of life.
  
• Microfinance and economic empowerment programs. Intuitively (and according to very limited and preliminary evidence), we believe that microfinance programs may be uniquely cost-effective ways of accomplishing a goal that our current recommended charities do not: helping people escape poverty and permanently raise their standard of living. Our initial research focused on large international organizations, and we did not find a program we could be highly confident in (for details, see our full report here). However, we now believe there is more potential – for this particular cause – in smaller organizations.
  
• Programs focused specifically on empowering women. Women in the developing world face unique problems related to social inequalities. We believe that charities may be able to help in a variety of ways, from maternal care (preventing deaths in childbirth as well as debilitating conditions such as obstetric fistula) to women-centered economic empowerment programs (helping clients go beyond culturally imposed limitations).

Conclusion

We recommend Population Services International and Partners in Health to donors interested in helping people extremely cost-effectively. We believe that further research will reveal many more excellent opportunities for donors; because of the extreme poverty of the developing world, the same funds can likely have a much larger impact when spent in this area.

References

• Victora, C. G., Wagstaff, A., Schellenberg, J. A., Gwatkin, D., Claeson, M. & Habicht, J. 2003, ‘Applying an equity lens to child health and mortality: more of the same is not enough’, The Lancet, vol. 362, pp. 233-41. (Available online)
• Black, R. E., Morris, S. S. & Bryce, J. 2003. ‘Where and why are 10 million children dying every year?’, The Lancet, vol. 361, pp. 2226-34. (Available online)
• Jones, G., Steketee, R., Black R., Zulfiqar, A., Morris, S. & the Bellagio Child Survival Study
  Group. 2003, ‘How many child deaths can we prevent this year?’, The Lancet, vol. 362, pp. 65-71. (Available online)

• Varley, R. C. G., Tarvid, J. & Chao, D. N. W. 1998, ‘A reassessment of the cost-effectiveness of water and sanitation interventions in programmes for controlling childhood diarrhoea’, Bulletin of the World Health Organization, vol. 76, no. 6, pp. 617-31. (Available online)

GiveWell recommends the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) to donors interested in helping to improve academic performance for low-income students.

Our full report is currently pending review by the charities we discuss; we do not make our content public before giving relevant parties a chance to look at it. A brief summary of our reasoning is available via our developed-world overview document.

If you would like to be notified when we make our full report public, please fill out the brief form below.

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Click here for this overview in PDF format.

In 2007, we evaluated charities that aim to improve equality of opportunity in the United States, through a variety of programs ranging from early childhood care to K-12 education to employment assistance for adults. We found that:

• The U.S. achievement gap is large and deep-rooted – appearing as early as the age of five – and improving equality of opportunity is far from straightforward.
• Earlier-in-life interventions have stronger empirical support than later-in-life interventions.
• Few charities are associated with empirical evidence that they’re changing lives for the better; we recommend the Nurse-Family Partnership and the Knowledge is Power Program as standout organizations.

Below are the highlights of what we learned. For more detail, see our reports on individual causes:

• Early childhood care report
• K-12 education report
• Employment assistance report

The achievement gap

U.S. children who grow up in low-income households are statistically less likely to succeed in school, more likely to have low earnings themselves, and more likely to be arrested and incarcerated compared to other children. Is it possible for a donor to help improve equality of opportunity?

(Data in the charts below comes from the from Panel Study of Income Dynamics as found in Duncan, Kalil and Ziol-Guest, 2008).

The achievement gap starts in early childhood

Different organizations have extremely different views of where these disparities come from, and of what a donor can do to help “close the opportunity gap.” For our part, we question how much can be accomplished by low-intensity and/or late-in-life interventions, because of consistent evidence that the achievement gap is generally significant before children enter kindergarten.

(The data below comes from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort as found in Rathbun, West and Hausken, 2004. Note that this source provides mean scale scores, not percentile ranks; we converted the scores to percentile ranks by assuming a normal distribution and using the data on standard deviations found in Murnane, Willett, Bub and McCartney, 2006. Our calculations are available in an Excel file, located here.)

Improving equality of opportunity: a donor’s options

Early childhood care: day care and other programs - Extremely promising, but organizations vary in approaches and effectiveness

Early childhood care has been rigorously shown to make a positive difference in later life outcomes. Early childhood care is superior – in terms of the quality of research and the impressiveness of the results – to any other intervention we’ve seen aimed at improving later life outcomes for disadvantaged people in the U.S. This superiority is particularly compelling in the context of the fact that many of the disparities charities seek to address appear to be present in and before kindergarten.

Select preschool programs have demonstrated impressive impacts on later life outcomes; in some studies, children who were randomly selected for intensive pre-K care had higher high school graduation rates at age 18 and superior academic performance as late as age 21. (For our full report on pre-school programs, click here.) However, results from less intensive preschool programs are more mixed, and we have been unable to find a preschool-centered charity that can demonstrate a consistent and lasting effect on its enrollees (either by tracking them directly or by demonstrating fidelity to an already-proven model).

Early childhood care, Nurse-Family Partnership - Effective

The Nurse-Family Partnership is a standout for its commitment to a truly proven program. The program consists of sending registered nurses to perform regular visits to low-income mothers, both during and immediately after pregnancy (up until the child’s second birthday), in order to counsel them on issues such as birth spacing, child nutrition, and maintaining a safe and supportive environment. Repeated studies of this program have shown lasting differences between those who did and didn’t participate in the program (even when participants were chosen by lottery). For our full report on the Nurse-Family Partnership, click here

K-12 education, from public to private school - Not effective

One of the charities we evaluated – the Children’s Scholarship Fund – gives partial tuition scholarships to low-income families, helping them to send their children to the school of their choice. Yet the studies we’ve seen of such scholarships indicate little, if any, effect on academic performance. For full details on the studies we read, see our review of the Children’s Scholarship Fund here.

The charts below are taken from a study of the New York City Voucher experiment, in which students were offered partial-tuition scholarships by random lottery. A “treatment group” of those offered scholarships and a “control group” of those not offered scholarships were tracked and compared to each other on math and reading achievement; very little difference emerged over the three years of the evaluation.

(Data in the charts below comes from Myers, Peterson, Mayer, Chou and Howell 2000 for years 0-2 and Mayer, Myers, Tuttle, and Howell 2000 for year 3.)

Similar experiments in other cities have yielded similar results (see this for more detail). We find this result counterintuitive but plausible. We have two hypotheses for why a scholarship program may not work as well as hoped:

• Partial-tuition scholarships may primarily benefit the most motivated families – families that would find ways to improve their educational situation with or without scholarships. (Similar dynamics could apply to nearly any education-related intervention that relies on voluntary application and enrollment.)
• “Normal” private schools may not be the best setting for students who are already disadvantaged and struggling, and who may need extra help.

K-12 Education, Knowledge is Power Program - Appears effective

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) takes the position that disadvantaged students are behind from the day they enter, and need schools that are focused on going above and beyond a “normal” education. Our analysis implies that KIPP is having a real effect on academic outcomes, showing significant gains throughout KIPP’s national network of schools.

(Data in the charts below comes from publicly available standardized test scores. Please see our report on KIPP for full information on data and sources.)

We do not have lottery-based data for KIPP, as we do for scholarship programs, and we’ve had to make certain assumptions in estimating its impact. But ultimately, we believe that KIPP is making a real difference where many others are not. (Our full analysis is available by clicking here.)

K-12 Education, Other Approaches - Not Proven

Other interventions, such as tutoring programs and summer school, have little evidence of any kind behind them; having seen how an intuitive and appealing solution like scholarships can fail to have the desired effects, we are not optimistic about such programs.

Employment assistance programs: Costly and unproven

Employment assistance programs cost up to $20,000 per person served (this is almost twice the cost of a year of grade-school education, or twice the entire per-person cost of the Nurse Family Partnership program), and often see a small minority of their enrollees get jobs that they hold for more than a year. We have yet to see a program in this area with clear evidence that it is helping people get better jobs, careers, or lives than they could get without charitable assistance. (For our full report on employment assistance, click here.)

Conclusion

• By the age of five, children from low-income families are substantially behind academically. Measures such as earnings and incarceration show analogous differences later in life.
• Research shows that early childhood care can have substantial effects on later life outcomes such as academic achievement, earnings, and criminal behavior. The Nurse-Family Partnership, which arranges home visits by nurses to low-income mothers, is an outstanding charity in this area, committed to replicating a proven program.
• Some evidence suggests that the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a charity that runs charter schools aimed at disadvantaged children, can significantly improve their academic performance.
• Many post-kindergarten interventions – from academic scholarships and vouchers to employment assistance programs – are costly, and evidence does not support the notion that they effectively change life outcomes.

References

• Duncan, G. J., Kalil, A. & Ziol-Guest, K. 2008. "The economic costs of early childhood poverty," Partnership for America’s Economic Success, Issue Paper #4. Available online.
• Murnane, R.J., Willett, J.B., Bub, K.L. & McCartney, K. 2006. "Understanding trends in the black-white achievement gaps during the first years of school," Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs.
• Rathbun, A., West, J. & Hausken, E. G. 2004. "From Kindergarten through the third grade: children’s beginning school experiences," National Center for Educational Statistics. Available online.
• Myers, D., Peterson, P., Mayer, D., Chou, J. & Howell, W. G. 2000, ‘School choice in New York City after two years: an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Program,’ Mathematica Policy Research. Available online.
• Mayer, D., Peterson, P., Myers, D., Tuttle, C. C. & Howell, W. G. 2000, ‘School choice in New York City after three years: an evaluation of the School Choice Scholarships Program,’ Mathematica Policy Research. Available online.

GiveWell started as a group of donors trying to make the most of our donations. Our mission is to help you help others.

This page logs mistakes we've made, strategies we should have planned and executed differently, and lessons we've learned.

Because we are a startup organization working in areas we have little experience with, it is particularly important that we constantly recognize and learn from our shortcomings. We make this log public so as to be up front with any potential supporters about ways in which we need to improve.

A full review of our first year – both accomplishments and shortcomings - is available here.

Please use our survey, or just contact us, with other items that should be listed here.

Major issues

12/2007: overaggressive and inappropriate marketing

How we fell short: As part of an effort to gain publicity, GiveWell's staff (Holden and Elie) posted comments on many blogs that did not give adequate disclosure of our identities (though we did use our real first names); in a smaller number of cases, we posted comments and sent emails that deliberately concealed our identities. Our actions were wrong and rightly damaged GiveWell's reputation. More detail is available via the page for the board meeting that we held in response.

Given the nature of our work, it is essential that we hold ourselves to the highest standards of transparency in everything we do. Our poor judgment caused many people who had not previously encountered GiveWell to become extremely hostile to it.

What we are doing to improve: We issued a full public disclosure and apology, and directly notified all existing GiveWell donors of the incident. We held a Board meeting and handed out penalties that were publicly disclosed, along with the audio of the meeting. We increased the Board's degree of oversight over staff, particularly with regard to public communications.

6/2007: poorly constructed "causes" led to suboptimal grant allocation

How we fell short: For our first year of research, we grouped charities into causes ("Saving lives," "Global poverty," etc. - see the purple bar at the top of this page) based on the idea that charities within one cause could be decided on by rough but consistent metrics: for example, we had planned to decide Cause 1 (saving lives in Africa) largely on the basis of estimating the “cost per life saved” for each applicant. The extremely disparate nature of different charities’ activities meant that there were major limits to this type of analysis (we had anticipated some limits, but we encountered more).

Because of our commitment to make one grant per cause and our overly rigid and narrow definitions of "causes," we feel that we allocated our grant money suboptimally. For example, all Board members agreed that we had high confidence in two of our Cause 1 (saving lives) applicants, but very low confidence in all of our Cause 2 (global poverty) applicants. Yet we had to give equal size grants to the top applicant in each cause (and give nothing to the 2nd-place applicant in Cause 1).

What we are doing to improve: We plan to research fewer, broader causes in the future, giving ourselves more flexibility to grant the organizations that appeal to us most. We plan to explore broad sets of charities that intersect in terms of the people they serve and the research needed to understand them, rather than narrower causes based on the goal of an “apples to apples” comparison using consistent metrics.

6/2007-11/2007: set overly ambitious deadlines for completing our research

How we fell short: In July 2007, when we mailed out grant applications to charities, we told them that we would award grants by December 2007. We did not finish all necessary research by December 2007, and thus only paid out 3 of our planned 5 grants by the agreed upon date. We paid the last two grants in early March of 2008.

What we are doing to improve: Setting deadlines was particularly difficult for our first year, as we had no previous experience with grantmaking. With the first year behind us, we have a better sense of how time-consuming research is, and in the future we will set more conservative expectations.

6/2007-5/2008: research process relied excessively on open-ended grant applications

How we fell short: In our first year, we focused our time and effort overwhelmingly on getting information from applicants, as opposed to from academic and other independent literature. Applicants found this process extremely time-intensive and burdensome, particularly given the size of the grants. We also found that much of the information we found essential in making informed decisions was not submitted through grant applications (rather, we found it through independent research).

What we are doing to improve: We are modifying our research process. In the future, we will start by searching independent research to identify particularly promising approaches; we will send out applications (for our grants and recommendations) later in the process, and while we will still invite charities to make their case in whatever way they deem appropriate, we will treat the application primarily as a way of getting specific information about specific organizations rather than as the starting point of our research. We believe that doing so will improve our ability to collect information, and lower the burden on applicants.

Smaller issues

2/2008-5/2008: premature hiring

How we fell short: In an attempt to increase our research capacity, we hired our strongest volunteer in January, but terminated the relationship at the end of May. We have mutually agreed that, at this stage of our development, we can't provide the training and management necessary for someone of his skill set to add significant value.

What we are doing to improve: We have determined that for the time being, capacity building is not a primary goal; the overhead and risk involved in finding and incorporating a new hire would interfere too heavily with higher priorities at this point. This year, we are focused on testing and demonstrating that demand for rigorous research into giving options exists. If and when we answer that question in the affirmative, the next major priority will be building capacity.

12/2007-present: website not sufficiently engaging, has generated too little substantive feedback

How we fell short: We believe that our current reviews, while thorough, are overly dense and difficult to engage with. Feedback from our supporters has often included this theme. In addition, we have received relatively little critical engagement with our analysis from those not directly involved in the project. Our discussion forum has gone practically unused, despite being linked from the top of every review page. We have received many emails offering general support or asking us to consider a particular charity, but the number of people who have critiqued the content of our reviews – through email, survey, discussion forum, or our blog – remains very low. Our site is designed so that people can take quick action based on our recommendations, or dig into the details of our reasoning; we suspect that many people have opted for the former, and very few have opted for the latter.

What we are doing to improve: We believe that we can do a much better job presenting the most relevant and interesting information up front rather than sticking to the highly systematic approach we’ve used to date (which tends to present information in a fixed, consistent order rather than in order of importance and interest). Our research summary, and the documents linked from the top of it, represent a preliminary attempt to do so. We believe that the more conversations we have with supporters, identifying the information that stands out to them, the better we will be able to design our reviews in a way that encourages engagement and interest. It is important to note that improving the website is not a major priority over the next year, as we plan to focus more on personal fundraising (see our plan for more).

12/2007-5/2008: research process should have incorporated more and earlier site visits

How we fell short: We undervalued the role of the site visit during our first year; speaking directly with staff gives us the opportunity to get a clear picture of how an organization views itself, and therefore what sorts of information we should seek to get a picture of whether its approach works as intended. Applicants encouraged us to put more of our time into personal visits, so that we could “get to know” organizations rather than thrusting pre-defined questions on them.

What we are doing to improve: We have found site visits extremely useful in forming a picture of an organization and determining the most relevant questions for it. In the future, we will be modifying the structure of our research process, conducting site visits before we ask applicants to submit detailed organization-specific applications. We believe that doing so will lead to better-constructed applications that give us more information while imposing less burden on applicants.

After our first year, GiveWell completed a thorough report on our accomplishments, shortcomings, and lessons learned, and outlined our plans for the future. The full report is available via this link:

• Year 1 Review and Plan (ZIP format, five files: review of our first year, plans for the coming year, and three appendices summarizing our research findings and plans)

The report is also summarized below.