Author: Peter E. Cunningham
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Re-evaluating the Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers
This year, we re-evaluated the cost effectiveness of direct cash transfers as implemented by our friends at GiveDirectly. Our complete writeup is here, and full of fascinating details, but the main headline is: we now estimate that GiveDirectly’s flagship cash program is 3 to 4 times more cost-effective than we’d previously estimated. It is important…
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Making Predictions about Our Grants
From sports announcers to political pundits to friends gossipping about romantic interests, lots of people make probabilistic predictions about the future. But only some actually follow up to see how well their predictions performed. For instance, you may have heard that weather forecasters predicted that the 2024 hurricane season had an 85% chance of being…
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How Do You Value Information?
There’s a common piece of dating advice: before you commit, go on a big trip together. Hopefully the trip itself will be fun, but that’s (almost) beside the point: the real goal is to figure out how smoothly you solve problems together. When it starts raining at 10pm on a Friday and you’re caught outdoors…
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Research Strategy: Nutrition
Written by Marinella Capriati and Andrew Martin GiveWell has made several grants in the nutrition space to date—we’ve funded vitamin A supplementation through Helen Keller International for many years, and have made grants supporting both iron fortification and supplementation and community-based management of acute malnutrition. This year, we started systematically exploring nutrition as a grantmaking…
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Finding and Vaccinating More Children
We’re crossposting the first part of a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives aims to increase vaccination coverage in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers. We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the…
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Including GiveWell on Your Wedding Registry
Planning a wedding is stressful. Questions around who to invite, what to eat, where to take pictures, what kind of music to play—the list goes on and on. But when Lucie and Geoff started planning their big day, at least one element was a no-brainer. A fundraiser for GiveWell would serve as their wedding registry.…
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September 2024 Updates
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below! If you’d like to receive the complete…
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GiveWell as Moneyball
Written by Alex Singal and Tracy Williams If there’s one group of people who are as obsessed as we are with rigorously analyzing a complicated domain and figuring out where to prioritize scarce resources, it’s Major League Baseball front offices. With that in mind, we wanted to write this guide comparing some baseball statistics with…
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Research Strategy: Vaccines
GiveWell started supporting vaccines in 2015 and has made over $160 million in vaccine-related grants to date. With strong results from past work in this space, we’re now exploring how to reach more people with vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. This post discusses our current thinking on vaccines grantmaking and our key hypotheses about…
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September 2024 Open Thread
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…
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