Hi Vasco and Caleb, we appreciate the interest in the Global Health and Development Fund! This is Isabel Arjmand responding on behalf of GiveWell.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to manage this fund, and we think it’s a great opportunity for donors who want to support highly cost-effective global health and development programs. We’re also interested in having more in-depth conversations with Caleb and others involved in EA Funds about what the future of this fund should look like, and we’ll reach out to schedule that.
In the meantime, here are some notes on our grantmaking and how donations to the fund are currently used.
We expect the impact of giving to the Global Health and Development Fund (GHDF) is about the same as giving to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund: both go to the most impactful opportunities we’ve identified (across programs and organizations), and are a good fit for donors who’d like to support the full range of our grantmaking, including higher-risk grants and research. The online description of GHDF was written before the All Grants Fund existed (it launched in 2022), and the two funds are now filling a very similar niche. Caleb, we’d love to collaborate on updating the GHDF webpage to both reflect the existence of the All Grants Fund and include more recent grant payout reports.
In the broadest sense, GiveWell aims to maximize impact per dollar. Cost-effectiveness is the primary driver of our grantmaking decisions. But, “overall estimated cost-effectiveness of a grant” isn’t the same thing as “output of cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet.” (This blog post is old and not entirely reflective of our current approach, but it covers a similar topic.)
The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants.
We don’t have an institutional position on exactly how much of the decision comes down to the spreadsheet analysis (though Elie’s take of “80% plus” definitely seems reasonable!) and it varies by grant, but many of the factors we consider outside our models (e.g. qualitative factors about an organization) are in the service of making impact-oriented decisions. See this post for more discussion.
For a small number of grants, the case for the grant relies heavily on factors other than expected impact of that grant per se. For example, we sometimes make exit grants in order to be a responsible funder and treat partner organizations considerately even if we think funding could be used more cost-effectively elsewhere.
To add something to our top charities list (vs. make a grant from the All Grants Fund / GHDF), we want a high degree of confidence in the program. See our list of additional criteria for top charities here; some of those criteria aren’t proxies for cost-effectiveness, but are instead capturing whether a program provides the confidence and direct case for impact that donors expect from that product.
Also, we recognize it was confusing to have GiveDirectly on our top charity list when we believed our other top charities were substantially more cost-effective. Now, our list of top charities is limited to the programs that we think can most cost-effectively use marginal funding (currently, programs we believe to have room for more funding that is at least 10x unconditional cash transfers); see the fourth bullet point here.
Hi Vasco and Caleb, we appreciate the interest in the Global Health and Development Fund! This is Isabel Arjmand responding on behalf of GiveWell.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to manage this fund, and we think it’s a great opportunity for donors who want to support highly cost-effective global health and development programs. We’re also interested in having more in-depth conversations with Caleb and others involved in EA Funds about what the future of this fund should look like, and we’ll reach out to schedule that.
In the meantime, here are some notes on our grantmaking and how donations to the fund are currently used.
We expect the impact of giving to the Global Health and Development Fund (GHDF) is about the same as giving to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund: both go to the most impactful opportunities we’ve identified (across programs and organizations), and are a good fit for donors who’d like to support the full range of our grantmaking, including higher-risk grants and research. The online description of GHDF was written before the All Grants Fund existed (it launched in 2022), and the two funds are now filling a very similar niche. Caleb, we’d love to collaborate on updating the GHDF webpage to both reflect the existence of the All Grants Fund and include more recent grant payout reports.
In the broadest sense, GiveWell aims to maximize impact per dollar. Cost-effectiveness is the primary driver of our grantmaking decisions. But, “overall estimated cost-effectiveness of a grant” isn’t the same thing as “output of cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet.” (This blog post is old and not entirely reflective of our current approach, but it covers a similar topic.)
The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants.
We don’t have an institutional position on exactly how much of the decision comes down to the spreadsheet analysis (though Elie’s take of “80% plus” definitely seems reasonable!) and it varies by grant, but many of the factors we consider outside our models (e.g. qualitative factors about an organization) are in the service of making impact-oriented decisions. See this post for more discussion.
For a small number of grants, the case for the grant relies heavily on factors other than expected impact of that grant per se. For example, we sometimes make exit grants in order to be a responsible funder and treat partner organizations considerately even if we think funding could be used more cost-effectively elsewhere.
To add something to our top charities list (vs. make a grant from the All Grants Fund / GHDF), we want a high degree of confidence in the program. See our list of additional criteria for top charities here; some of those criteria aren’t proxies for cost-effectiveness, but are instead capturing whether a program provides the confidence and direct case for impact that donors expect from that product.
Also, we recognize it was confusing to have GiveDirectly on our top charity list when we believed our other top charities were substantially more cost-effective. Now, our list of top charities is limited to the programs that we think can most cost-effectively use marginal funding (currently, programs we believe to have room for more funding that is at least 10x unconditional cash transfers); see the fourth bullet point here.