Thanks for these questions Siebe! And I take your point on sharing context; I’ll edit in some points in the main post.
1. We have internally compared these charities on something close to a DALY-equivalent to aid our decisions (similar to what GiveWell does in their cost-effectiveness analyses), but have not included this in the report. This is not because of any assumptions the report makes on empowerment (note that it defines empowerment simply as ‘improving lives’). It’s mainly because of time constraints: we didn’t think it was worth putting in the time to present our estimates in a polished way, given the aims we have with this report (making high-quality recommendations to our members). This is also because internally we are still in the process of developing our views on how to compare across causes and outcome metrics.
2. In terms of cost-effectiveness estimates both do better than GiveDirectly (which we also recommend), and there is obviously large uncertainty in such estimates. Furthermore, Bandhan only accepts donations over $320,000 at this point. Last but not least, the organisations differ in marked ways (where they work, programme focus, target group, type of evidence) and might appeal to different people in our community.
3. We do have rough cost-effectiveness models on almost all of the other charities, but unfortunately I cannot make those public. This is partially for reasons of information sharing (I’d have to check with the charities that provided extra info), but also because these models aren’t as worked out as the ones in the report, and a one-to-one comparison would in many cases be confusing rather than valuable. In fact, most initial cost-effectiveness estimates of the other charities are higher than the final estimates of the recommended charities, and we had to deprioritise them to a large extent because the evidence was weaker. Moreover, we find that as we do a more extensive cost-effectiveness analysis of a charity (as we did for our recommended charities), the numbers often go down rather than up, so it’s likely that our ‘final’ estimates of the other charities would be much lower than the initial, rough estimates we have now.
Thanks for these questions Siebe! And I take your point on sharing context; I’ll edit in some points in the main post.
1. We have internally compared these charities on something close to a DALY-equivalent to aid our decisions (similar to what GiveWell does in their cost-effectiveness analyses), but have not included this in the report. This is not because of any assumptions the report makes on empowerment (note that it defines empowerment simply as ‘improving lives’). It’s mainly because of time constraints: we didn’t think it was worth putting in the time to present our estimates in a polished way, given the aims we have with this report (making high-quality recommendations to our members). This is also because internally we are still in the process of developing our views on how to compare across causes and outcome metrics.
2. In terms of cost-effectiveness estimates both do better than GiveDirectly (which we also recommend), and there is obviously large uncertainty in such estimates. Furthermore, Bandhan only accepts donations over $320,000 at this point. Last but not least, the organisations differ in marked ways (where they work, programme focus, target group, type of evidence) and might appeal to different people in our community.
3. We do have rough cost-effectiveness models on almost all of the other charities, but unfortunately I cannot make those public. This is partially for reasons of information sharing (I’d have to check with the charities that provided extra info), but also because these models aren’t as worked out as the ones in the report, and a one-to-one comparison would in many cases be confusing rather than valuable. In fact, most initial cost-effectiveness estimates of the other charities are higher than the final estimates of the recommended charities, and we had to deprioritise them to a large extent because the evidence was weaker. Moreover, we find that as we do a more extensive cost-effectiveness analysis of a charity (as we did for our recommended charities), the numbers often go down rather than up, so it’s likely that our ‘final’ estimates of the other charities would be much lower than the initial, rough estimates we have now.