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Allocation of discretionary funds from Q3 2019
In the third quarter of 2019, donors gave a combined $2.6 million to GiveWell for granting to recommended charities at our discretion. We greatly appreciate this support, which enables us to direct funding where we believe it can be used most impactfully. We grant this funding to one or more of our top charities each quarter.
We decided to allocate all $2.6 million to Helen Keller International’s (HKI) vitamin A supplementation (VAS) program. HKI is a GiveWell top charity that supports provision of vitamin A supplements to young children, reducing their likelihood of dying from infectious disease. It does so by providing technical assistance, engaging in advocacy, and contributing funding to government-run VAS programs in sub-Saharan Africa. We based our decision on our estimate of the high cost-effectiveness of the work HKI expects to conduct with this funding.
We provide an updated recommendation for donors below.
Summary
In this post, we discuss:
GiveWell is hiring!
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Update on GiveWell’s intervention research in 2017
One of our major goals for 2017 is “intervention prioritization,” our work to assess a large number of programs (interventions) as potential GiveWell priority programs we’d be interested in recommending charities working on.
Summary
This post will provide a brief overview of our intervention work this year, focusing on the interim and full intervention reports we’ve published in 2017.
Programs we plan to continue investigating:
- Sayana® Press
- Antiretroviral Therapy to Treat HIV/AIDS
- SMS Reminders for Vaccination
- Surgery to Repair Obstetric Fistula
- Interventions to Promote Handwashing
Programs we decided not to prioritize additional research on:
Deciding whether to recommend fistula management charities
We’ve long been interested in fistula surgery as a potential GiveWell priority program. However, as with other surgery charities, we have struggled to identify an organization that meets GiveWell’s criteria. Now, we’re working with a group called IDinsight and are excited that we may be able to consider a fistula surgery organization as a potential GiveWell top charity.
Our longstanding interest in interventions to treat fistula can be attributed in part to the popular narrative presented about fistula–the condition, which is often associated with social ostracization–appears to cause a significant amount of suffering, and seems to be treatable. We’re not sure how representative the popular narrative is, but as donors, it has contributed to our continued interest in better understanding this intervention, along with the feeling that surgery charities in general may offer low-cost, life-changing impacts.
Summary
This post will discuss:
- Fistula management, including surgery, as an intervention.
- Our open questions and uncertainty around fistula management programs, particularly their costs.
- Our plans to partner with IDinsight to help answer some of our questions about fistula management.