The Nonlinear Library EA - GiveWell from A to Z by GiveWell
Jan 12, 2024
06:22
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: GiveWell from A to Z, published by GiveWell on January 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Author: Isabel Arjmand, Special Projects Officer
To celebrate the end of 2023, we're highlighting a few key things to know about GiveWell - from A to Z. These aren't necessarily the 26 most important parts of our work (e.g., we could include only "transparency" or "top charities" for T) but they do fit the alphabet, and we've linked to other pages where you can learn more.
All Grants Fund. Our recommendation for donors who have a high level of trust in GiveWell and are open to programs that might be riskier than our top charities.
Bar. We set a cost-effectiveness bar, or threshold, such that we expect to be able to fully fund all the opportunities above that level of cost-effectiveness. This bar isn't a hard limit; we consider qualitative factors in our recommendations, as discussed here. This post also discusses our bar in more detail.
Cost-effectiveness. The core question we try to answer in our research is: How much good can you do by giving money to a certain program? This blog post describes how we approach cost-effectiveness estimates and use them in our work.
Donors. Unlike a foundation, we don't hold an endowment. Our impact comes from donors choosing to use our recommendations.
Effective giving organizations. Organizations like Effektiv Spenden, which fundraise for programs we recommend and provide tax-deductible donation options in a variety of countries. We're grateful to these national effective giving organizations and groups like Giving What We Can that recommend our work.
Footnotes.[1]
Generalizability. How well evidence generalizes to different settings, including variations in program implementation and the contexts where a program is delivered. Also called "external validity."
Health workers and community distributors. The people who deliver many of the programs we support; includes both professional health workers and distributors who receive stipends to deliver programs in their local communities. For example, community distributors go from household to household to provide seasonal malaria chemoprevention to millions of children.
Incubating new programs. We partner with the Evidence Action Accelerator and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) Incubator to scope, pilot, and scale up promising cost-effective interventions.
Judgment calls. We aim to create estimates that represent our true beliefs. Our cost-effectiveness analyses are firmly rooted in evidence but also incorporate adjustments and intuitions that aren't fully captured by scientific findings alone. More in this post.
Kangaroo mother care. A program to reduce neonatal mortality among low-birthweight babies through skin-to-skin contact to keep babies warm, breastfeeding instruction, home visits, and more.
Leverage. How our funding decisions affect other funders, either by crowding in additional funding ("leverage") or by displacing funds that otherwise would have been used for a given program ("fungibility").
Mistakes. Transparency is core to our work. Read here about mistakes we've made and lessons we've learned.
Nigeria. One of the countries where we most often fund work. (Our work is generally concentrated in Africa and South Asia.) New Incentives, one of our top charities, currently works exclusively in northern Nigeria, where low baseline vaccination rates make its work especially valuable.
Oral rehydration solution + zinc. A low-cost way to prevent and treat dehydration caused by diarrhea. We've been interested in ORS/zinc for a long time (going back to 2006!), and recently funded the CHAI Incubator to conduct a randomized controlled trial in Bauchi State, Nigeria, studying the extent to which preemptively distributing free ORS/zinc directly to households increases usage by children u...
Author: Isabel Arjmand, Special Projects Officer
To celebrate the end of 2023, we're highlighting a few key things to know about GiveWell - from A to Z. These aren't necessarily the 26 most important parts of our work (e.g., we could include only "transparency" or "top charities" for T) but they do fit the alphabet, and we've linked to other pages where you can learn more.
All Grants Fund. Our recommendation for donors who have a high level of trust in GiveWell and are open to programs that might be riskier than our top charities.
Bar. We set a cost-effectiveness bar, or threshold, such that we expect to be able to fully fund all the opportunities above that level of cost-effectiveness. This bar isn't a hard limit; we consider qualitative factors in our recommendations, as discussed here. This post also discusses our bar in more detail.
Cost-effectiveness. The core question we try to answer in our research is: How much good can you do by giving money to a certain program? This blog post describes how we approach cost-effectiveness estimates and use them in our work.
Donors. Unlike a foundation, we don't hold an endowment. Our impact comes from donors choosing to use our recommendations.
Effective giving organizations. Organizations like Effektiv Spenden, which fundraise for programs we recommend and provide tax-deductible donation options in a variety of countries. We're grateful to these national effective giving organizations and groups like Giving What We Can that recommend our work.
Footnotes.[1]
Generalizability. How well evidence generalizes to different settings, including variations in program implementation and the contexts where a program is delivered. Also called "external validity."
Health workers and community distributors. The people who deliver many of the programs we support; includes both professional health workers and distributors who receive stipends to deliver programs in their local communities. For example, community distributors go from household to household to provide seasonal malaria chemoprevention to millions of children.
Incubating new programs. We partner with the Evidence Action Accelerator and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) Incubator to scope, pilot, and scale up promising cost-effective interventions.
Judgment calls. We aim to create estimates that represent our true beliefs. Our cost-effectiveness analyses are firmly rooted in evidence but also incorporate adjustments and intuitions that aren't fully captured by scientific findings alone. More in this post.
Kangaroo mother care. A program to reduce neonatal mortality among low-birthweight babies through skin-to-skin contact to keep babies warm, breastfeeding instruction, home visits, and more.
Leverage. How our funding decisions affect other funders, either by crowding in additional funding ("leverage") or by displacing funds that otherwise would have been used for a given program ("fungibility").
Mistakes. Transparency is core to our work. Read here about mistakes we've made and lessons we've learned.
Nigeria. One of the countries where we most often fund work. (Our work is generally concentrated in Africa and South Asia.) New Incentives, one of our top charities, currently works exclusively in northern Nigeria, where low baseline vaccination rates make its work especially valuable.
Oral rehydration solution + zinc. A low-cost way to prevent and treat dehydration caused by diarrhea. We've been interested in ORS/zinc for a long time (going back to 2006!), and recently funded the CHAI Incubator to conduct a randomized controlled trial in Bauchi State, Nigeria, studying the extent to which preemptively distributing free ORS/zinc directly to households increases usage by children u...