Hello EA members!
Quick question: what are currently the most effective cause areas and charities when looking at global health and poverty interventions? So far I have limited my donation to GiveWell’s list, which is exclusively focused on saving lives in the most effective manner possible, and GiveDirectly, which is as far as I know the most effective extreme poverty-alleviating charity. Can you tell me what is the current status within EA of the following cause areas/charities?
Sight interventions such as those provided by Seva Foundation or The Fred Hollows Foundation.
Deworming, such as Evidence Action.
Education-based interventions, such as Educate Girls, Teaching at the Right Level Africa etc.
Fistula Foundation?
Media/family planning interventions such as Development Media International.
Village Enterprise as compared with GiveDirectly?
As you can see, I am mainly focusing on The Life You Can Save recommended charities, and I am basically asking how effective these are compared with GiveWell. I found it hard to find concrete evidence of effectiveness for some of these.
As this is my first post, please forgive my ignorance of posting habits/rules.
Fantastic question thanks so much and welcome!
My simple answer would be that all the interventions you have listed have good evidence behind them and are probably effective charities. Different people will argue for diferent ones.
GiveWell probably do the most rigorous work, and none of their top 4 are on your list (which might be intentional on your part).
Just in my opinion, if you’re looking at pure cost effectiveness, based on the evidence we have, teaching at the right level and media/family planning interventions might have a bit of an edge over the others.
It’s a great question about cash transfers vs. The village Enterprise model of cash transfers plus training. I’m not sure where the evidence is on that front at the moment!
I love educate girls, but think that teaching at the right level Africa has a better evidence base behind it. I’m skeptical though about TARLs effectiveness at scale, because TARL Africa was a huge organization set up pretty recently without a wealth of operational experience oersonally I don’t love the idea of setting up massive organizations quickly, based on evidence that some intervention (in this case TARL) is likely to be effective. I think there are likely to be huge operational mistakes and inefficiencies there which massively decrease cost effectiveness well below what is theoretically possible. I prefer the Charity entrepreneurship approach of starting small and building up orgs that can learn from mistakes as they go and adapt, while doing one thing very well. Within a few years the best orgs will grow naturally to be ready to absorb the kind of money which TARL Africa has likely absorbed too quickly in my opinion.
These are just my lightly held opi.nions though, I love your list and all the best deciding where to give your money.
GiveWell and Life You Can Save have different evaluation methods. @The Life You Can Save describes their evaluation framework here. @GiveWell explains theirs here.
From my quite ignorant outsider view, the difference seem to be:
1. GiveWell aims to find the most cost-effective charities based on calculations of cost-per-life-saved or cost-per-economic-benefit. The Life You Can Save seems to consider these sorts of calculations to be too uncertain and dependent on subjective assumptions to allow for charities to be ranked reliably, so they recommend an unranked collection of generally very good charities. The Life You Can Save says that they...
2. GiveWell is more hard-line about gaps in evidence being disqualifying. With the example of Fred Hollows, GiveWell says:
The Life You Can Save seems to be more willing to accept gaps in the evidence as long as some good evidence exists and the charity fits other, softer criteria, like how convincing their theory of change is (explained in their long and sort of convoluted evaluation framework). For this reason they do recommend Fred Hollows.
TL;DR: In sticking to hard evidence and cost-effectiveness calculations, GiveWell is potentially leaving behind highly effective charities whose effectiveness is harder to prove or producing questionable rankings because of questionable assumptions, while The Life You Can Save’s more holistic evaluation approach is potentially including charities whose evidence has holes in it and they draw no distinction in quality between Malaria Consortium and the Fred Hollows Foundation, even though a substantial difference in effectiveness might exist