Agriculture charity evaluation: Incomes boosted are not the same as lives...
What’s wrong with this “evidence of impact” for high-profile charities? The Millennium Villages project‘s main evidence of impact so far appears to be increasing crop yields by a factor of 4-15x in 3...
View ArticleChess in the Schools
The New York Times recently profiled Chess in the Schools: The Chess-in-the-Schools program has sought to foster analytical skills on the theory that these will help students succeed academically. The...
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More on the microfinance “repayment rate”
We are concerned about the way repayment rates are often reported. We’ve written about this issue before, arguing that different delinquency indicators can easily be misleading and pointing to one...
View ArticleCan choosing the right charity double your impact?
Reader Evan writes: I’ve been thinking about how best to donate to Haiti, and I reviewed some of the materials on your website and found them pretty helpful and persuasive. So thank you! But then my...
View ArticleIn defense of the streetlight effect
In a recent guest post for Development Impact, Martin Ravallion writes: The current fashion [for evaluating aid projects] is for randomized control trials (RCTs) and social experiments more generally …...
View ArticleWhat it takes to evaluate impact
When someone asks me what makes GiveWell different from other third-party charity evaluators, I often answer by listing all the things we’ve done in order to investigate our current top-rated charity,...
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Rethinking VillageReach’s pilot project
Background Over the past 3 years, VillageReach has received over $2 million as a direct result of our recommendation. VillageReach put these funds towards its work to scale up its health logistics...
View ArticleHow we evaluate a study
We previously wrote about our general principles for assessing evidence, where “evidence” is construed broadly (it may include awards/recognition/reputation, testimony, and broad trends in data as well...
View ArticleWhy it’s important to think through all of the factors that influence a...
Charity evaluation is rarely straightforward. Many factors, within a charity’s control or outside of it, can influence the impact a charity has. This blog post will highlight a case that illustrates...
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We aim to cost-effectively direct around $1 billion annually by 2025
A little over a decade ago in 2010, GiveWell directed around $1.5 million to the charities we recommended.[1] In 2021, we expect we’ll raise at least $500 million, and may raise as much as $560 million...
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