GiveWell charity recommendations

In a rare Christmas-themed post here, I pass along this note from Alexander Berger at GiveWell:

We just published a blog post following up on the *other* famous piece of evidence for deworming, the Miguel and Kremer experiment from Kenya. They shared data and code from their working paper (!) follow-up finding that deworming increases incomes ten years later, and we came out of the re-analysis feeling more confident in, though not wholly convinced by, the results.
We’ve also just released our new list of top charities for giving season this year, which I think might be a good fit for your audience. We wrote a blog post explaining our choices, and have also published extensive reviews of the top charities and the interventions on which they work. Perhaps the most interesting change since last year is the addition of GiveDirectly in the #2 spot; they do direct unconditional cash transfers to people living on less than a dollar a day in Kenya. We think it’s a remarkable model, with a surprisingly strong track record and the potential to change how international charity is done. We’ve also published extensive updates over the past year on the progress of the Against Malaria Foundation, which continues to hold the #1 spot. (And if you’re interested, a more general overview of what GiveWell is all about is here.)

I asked the following question to Berger: Why only three choices on your list of top charities? I’m sure that the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, and Schistosomiasis Control Initiative are all great, but it could be good to have other options too. For example, Deb and I state in our book that we donate all royalties to nonprofit educational charities (or something like that, I can’t remember the exact words). I haven’t actually kept track of this for awhile, so I think I’ll a write a check for a few thousand dollars. But what would be a good educational charity? Maybe GiveWell has a suggestion?

Berger replied:

When GiveWell started, we did research in a number of different areas (U.S. education, international education, international economic empowerment, and global health). For instance, our 2010 cause overview on international education is here. Over time, we’ve become more and more convinced that global health is an especially promising cause for individual donors. We’ve written about this pretty extensively on our blog (see here), but we’ve come to believe that international health has an especially strong track record of success, potentially outstanding cost-effectiveness, and relatively high accountability to outcomes, making it an especially strong area for open-minded donors to focus on.
Of course, we agree that there are worthwhile charities working in other areas of international giving, and in the past we’ve recommended Pratham, an Indian education NGO, for donors especially interested in education. We recently de-emphasized the category of “standouts” (where Pratham fell) because they received a relatively small portion of the money given based on our recommendations and we felt that our research time was better-spent in areas we find more promising.

Fair enough. Here’s what GiveWell wrote about Pratham:

Pratham is a large, India-based organization that runs a wide variety of programs aiming to improve education for children in India.

Pratham’s largest program is Read India, which provides basic reading and math lessons to millions of preschool- and primary-school-age children. . . .

We recommend Pratham as our top recommendation for developing-world education because:

– GiveWell staff visited Pratham programs two times in Mumbai, India during the fall of 2010. We do not feel that these visits allowed us to evaluate the effectiveness of Pratham’s programs, but we came away with a generally positive impression. For more, see our Fall 2010 India site visit notes.

– Our impression is that Pratham has a strong reputation among people who are familiar with Indian educational organizations. Pratham has a strong reputation among respected international aid scholars such as researchers at the Poverty Action Lab at MIT.4 In addition, several representatives from other charities in India, told us (unsolicited) that they have the impression that Pratham is a strong organization.

– There is limited evidence about what works in developing-world education. Programs that intuitively seem effective such as building schools, training teachers or providing textbooks do not have a strong track record of success. (For more on this cause, see our overview of developing-world education programs.) In a sector with limited evidence about what works, Pratham stands out for having subjected its programs to rigorous trials to determine which approaches are most effective. (For more on Pratham’s commitment to evaluation, see the evaluation section of our July 2009 review.)

Despite the above, we are not confident in Pratham’s overall impact. Nevertheless, for donors interested in the cause of developing-world education, we have found no organization stronger than Pratham.

I wanted to share that because I felt that discussion was admirably honest (or, at least, gave the impression of honesty; I haven’t actually tried to evaluate the claims) without hype.

11 thoughts on “GiveWell charity recommendations

  1. My money is on unconditional cash transfers: let the recipients choose. (But whatever you do don’t call them vouchers, some of in your audience may go apoplectic)

    Some recipients may choose badly but, by and large, I believe most will make the best allocation for their situation. The alternative is have donors administer one solution to fit everyone.

    PS The latter approach, of course, keeps several donors, bureaucrats, public sector employees, and NGO-FBGs employed, which likely adds moral hazard. (NGO-FBGs = Non-governmental Organizations Financed by Governments.)

    PPS The one-solution-fits-all mostly works in basic health as you can safely assume most people would rather live than die. So I also agree on emphasis on health.

  2. GiveWell is doing God’s work. It looks like charities vary a lot in their effectiveness (orders of magnitude), so the very best charities do dramatically more good than the average charity. Thus identifying the very most effective charities, which is what GiveWell is trying to do, and getting people to shift their donations to those also does a lot of good.

    Since it’s hard to show effectiveness, for a long time charities have competed for donor dollars primarily on their ability to look good rather than do good. GiveWell is trying to give them incentives to do good.

    • I once spent (wasted?) a few hours going through a Metafilter thread triggered by GiveWell’s astroturfing practices back in 2007. (I believe their getting busted on that front led directly to the “mistakes” page on their website.) My main takeaway was that Givewell was founded by some very young people (they’ve been around for around 5 years now, and their founders graduated from college in 2003 and 2004), without much experience in the charity world, and with limited resources to carry out full-fledged investigations of the entire industry.

      This is not to say that they aren’t great people who do great work plugging away at a challenging and important problem; but “God’s work” may be a little strong.

  3. To second this, the de-emphasis on education charity is because that is far less efficient in terms of quality adjusted life years per dollar than are the health initiative charities. If you want to purchase inefficient charitable donations (as measured by GiveWell or Giving What We Can) to gain utility from something else (nice feeling you get about the potential effects of the education dollars you spent, say) that’s totally fine, but GiveWell or Giving What We Can then can’t really help you. Maybe look at Charity Navigator for that?

    • Ely:

      I think you’re being a bit glib with the bit about the “nice feeling.” That nice feeling is what charity is all about! After all, if I just wanted to do the most efficient thing, I’d donate every dollar I have to GiveWell’s charity #1, rather than just donating some small percentage of my income. Also, GiveWell can help me donate well to education: I plan to write a check to Pratham, which they recommend above.

      • It wasn’t my intention to be glib. People can have different preference functions that they try to satisfy when choosing to donate. I’m just saying we can impute from your preference to distribute some funds to the education charity that your preference isn’t to maximize your donation’s efficacy in terms of quality-adjusted life years.

        There’s nothing wrong with that in any absolute sense, but I would fall in the camp of giving all donations to the single most effective charity. I suppose I could be persuaded that some mean-variance optimization is also good, since a single charitable organization’s performance might vary from time period to time period (geopolitical instability, natural disasters, etc.) and so I’d want to diversify away my exposure to such risks to the extent that I think they are important (I personally think they are basically entirely unimportant).

        It’s kind of idiosyncratic that GW had info on Pratham to offer you, so I still don’t think it should be general practice for non-QALY-maximizers (such as you) to seek charity advice from a basically QALY-maximizing aviser. (I know that GW doesn’t technically use QALYs as an optimization measure, but their process is extremely highly correlated with Giving What We Can’s process, which does optimize QALYs).

  4. I am intrigued that they directly “took on” the authoritative Cochrane Collaboration on evidence evaluation http://poverty-action.org/blog/cochrane%E2%80%99s-incomplete-and-misleading-summary-evidence-deworming given on the face of it their staff does not _seem_ to have the requisite background. Sometimes it is an advantage not to know one might be tugging on Superman’s cape.

    This suggests Cochrane Collaboration is not always open to criticism http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/holmes-deconstruction-ebhc-06.pdf and a couple senior clinical colleagues have pprivately indicated they would be very reluctant to be openly critical of the Cochrane Collaboration. Nothing terribly odd about that for a large entity (universities, governments, churches) but shows the value of smart people who may not know better – evaluating an area they are new and fresh to.

    • Thanks for the comment. Just to be clear, the document you link to in the first paragraph is a reply by the authors of a study to the Cochrane review’s treatment of their study, not a GiveWell document. We link to it from the top of our discussion of the Cochrane review (http://blog.givewell.org/2012/07/13/new-cochrane-review-of-the-effectiveness-of-deworming/) because we thought that on a couple issues the reply seemed right, but we spent the entirety of our own post discussing how the Cochrane update changed our views. Also, we’re big Cochrane fans – we’ve even recommended a grant to them in the past (blog.givewell.org/2012/09/27/us-cochrane-center-uscc-gets-our-first-quick-grant-recommendation/) – so so much for that advantage!

      • I should have read more carefully, but “Nothing terribly odd about that for a large entity” [that does a lot of good things] to not handle criticism well.

        I also meant to look if you had evaluated them, but other things came up.

        I would be very interested in an evidence based cost-effectiveness analysis of their activities, inspite of how many fans they already have or perhaps even because they have so many fans. I do believe it would come out in the balance quite favourably – but do think they would benifit from more criticism.

  5. If you’re looking for suggestions, especially those that both do good work and have a statistics focus, I enthusiastically recommend taking a lo0k at Dean Karlan’s IPA, Innovations for Poverty Action at http://www.poverty-action.org. You’re investing in figuring out what actually works.

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