Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. But if you lobby for better fishing policy…
A charity focused on cost-effective giving is shifting its sights toward influencing policy.
What’s the most cost-effective way to help people?
Lots of people have tried to answer that question. Donors care, a lot, about whether the charities they’re giving to are effective (though they often don’t know a good way to measure that). Charity evaluators like GuideStar, CharityWatch, and Charity Navigator rate charities primarily by how well they’re run.
My favorite charity evaluator, GiveWell, takes a different approach — the group focuses on identifying charities that deliver the most cost-effective interventions available. In global health and development, for example, we often have robust evidence that some health interventions are a particularly good way to save and change lives. That means that the charities delivering those interventions are places where your money goes especially far. Those interventions include distributing malaria nets, treating kids for intestinal parasites, supplementing Vitamin A to reduce child mortality from infectious disease, and, yes, just directly giving people money.
But can we do better than that? That’s a question GiveWell is asking — and it is expanding its scope in the hopes of finding even more promising opportunities.
GiveWell recently announced that it’s more than doubling the size of its research team to try to find more cost-effective programs. But its revised approach involves increased attention to something relatively new for GiveWell: policy-oriented philanthropy.
In a blog post announcing the change, the organization said it would be researching new, more complex ways to measure how to do good in areas, including:
- Public health regulations like anti-smoking laws, restrictions on lead paint, air pollution, and the fight against counterfeit medicines
- “Improving government program selection,” or assisting governments in their selection of more effective health, education, and antipoverty programs
- “Improving government implementation,” or helping with training and operations so that government policies work better
- “Increasing economic growth and redistribution” — advocating for or helping implement policies that produce healthy overall economic growth, and ones that reduce inequality
- Improved data collection
- Advocating for more aid spending to go to the most cost-effective direct-delivery programs
GiveWell is not planning to change their focus on low- and middle-income countries. But they’ll CONTINUE READING: GiveWell expands cost-effective giving focus to include policy interventions - Vox
