The Nonlinear Library EA - GiveWell's 2023 recommendations to donors by GiveWell
Nov 22, 2023
13:54
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's 2023 recommendations to donors, published by GiveWell on November 22, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
We're excited about the impact donors can have by supporting our All Grants Fund and our Top Charities Fund. For donors who want to support the programs we're most confident in, we recommend the Top Charities Fund, which is allocated among our four top charities. For donors with a higher degree of trust in GiveWell and willingness to take on more risk, our top recommendation is the All Grants Fund, which goes to a wider range of opportunities and may have higher impact per dollar.
Read more about the options for giving below. We estimate that donations to the programs we recommend can save a life for roughly $5,000 on average,[1] or have similarly strong impact by increasing incomes or preventing suffering. Click here to donate.
Why your support matters
We expect to find more outstanding giving opportunities than we can fully fund unless our community of supporters substantially increases its giving. Figures like $5,000 per life saved are rough estimates; while we spend thousands of hours on our cost-effectiveness analyses, they're still inherently uncertain. But the bottom line is that we think donors have the opportunity to do a huge amount of good by supporting the programs we recommend.
For a concrete sense of what a donation can do, let's focus briefly on seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which involves distributing preventive medication to young children. We've directed funding to Malaria Consortium to implement SMC in several countries, including Burkina Faso.[2]
In Burkina Faso, community health promoters go from household to household across the country, every month during the rainy season (when malaria is most common). They give medicine to each child under the age of five, which involves mixing a medicated tablet into water and then spoon-feeding the medicine to infants and having young children drink it from a cup. They also give caregivers instructions to give additional preventive medicine over the next two days.
It costs roughly $6 to reach a child with a full season's worth of SMC (though this figure doesn't account for fungibility, which pushes our estimate of overall cost-effectiveness downward).[3] If a child receives a full course of SMC, we estimate that they're about five times less likely to get malaria during the rainy season (which is when roughly 70% of cases occur).
Community distributor providing SMC medication to a child sitting on mother's lap. Photo courtesy of Malaria Consortium.
Imagine a village with 135 families in it, each with two kids under the age of five, for a total of 270 young children. In this village, imagine that every child is reached with a full course of SMC during the rainy season.[4] Without SMC, we estimate that on average, 100[5] of those 270 young kids would test positive for malaria at any given point in time (though we think most of them would be asymptomatic). We estimate that SMC brings the overall prevalence of malaria down from 100 kids to only 40.[6] For kids who would be symptomatic, this is the difference between feeling healthy and experiencing fever, aches, and other flu-like symptoms.
What we're excited to have recommended so far
This year, we've recommended grants to extend and expand programs we've supported for a while, like top charities, and we've also supported programs that are newer to us. With a decline in expected funding from Open Philanthropy, we've slowed our spending to match the funding we expect to raise going forward; we've focused more of our grantmaking on building for the future rather than funding large-scale opportunities this year. Below, we describe four selected grants from this year.[8]
More about each of these grants:
$6.6 million to the Clinton Heal...
We're excited about the impact donors can have by supporting our All Grants Fund and our Top Charities Fund. For donors who want to support the programs we're most confident in, we recommend the Top Charities Fund, which is allocated among our four top charities. For donors with a higher degree of trust in GiveWell and willingness to take on more risk, our top recommendation is the All Grants Fund, which goes to a wider range of opportunities and may have higher impact per dollar.
Read more about the options for giving below. We estimate that donations to the programs we recommend can save a life for roughly $5,000 on average,[1] or have similarly strong impact by increasing incomes or preventing suffering. Click here to donate.
Why your support matters
We expect to find more outstanding giving opportunities than we can fully fund unless our community of supporters substantially increases its giving. Figures like $5,000 per life saved are rough estimates; while we spend thousands of hours on our cost-effectiveness analyses, they're still inherently uncertain. But the bottom line is that we think donors have the opportunity to do a huge amount of good by supporting the programs we recommend.
For a concrete sense of what a donation can do, let's focus briefly on seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which involves distributing preventive medication to young children. We've directed funding to Malaria Consortium to implement SMC in several countries, including Burkina Faso.[2]
In Burkina Faso, community health promoters go from household to household across the country, every month during the rainy season (when malaria is most common). They give medicine to each child under the age of five, which involves mixing a medicated tablet into water and then spoon-feeding the medicine to infants and having young children drink it from a cup. They also give caregivers instructions to give additional preventive medicine over the next two days.
It costs roughly $6 to reach a child with a full season's worth of SMC (though this figure doesn't account for fungibility, which pushes our estimate of overall cost-effectiveness downward).[3] If a child receives a full course of SMC, we estimate that they're about five times less likely to get malaria during the rainy season (which is when roughly 70% of cases occur).
Community distributor providing SMC medication to a child sitting on mother's lap. Photo courtesy of Malaria Consortium.
Imagine a village with 135 families in it, each with two kids under the age of five, for a total of 270 young children. In this village, imagine that every child is reached with a full course of SMC during the rainy season.[4] Without SMC, we estimate that on average, 100[5] of those 270 young kids would test positive for malaria at any given point in time (though we think most of them would be asymptomatic). We estimate that SMC brings the overall prevalence of malaria down from 100 kids to only 40.[6] For kids who would be symptomatic, this is the difference between feeling healthy and experiencing fever, aches, and other flu-like symptoms.
What we're excited to have recommended so far
This year, we've recommended grants to extend and expand programs we've supported for a while, like top charities, and we've also supported programs that are newer to us. With a decline in expected funding from Open Philanthropy, we've slowed our spending to match the funding we expect to raise going forward; we've focused more of our grantmaking on building for the future rather than funding large-scale opportunities this year. Below, we describe four selected grants from this year.[8]
More about each of these grants:
$6.6 million to the Clinton Heal...