News

Giving What We Can has now completed its second round of charity recommendations, adding Deworm the World and the Against Malaria Foundation to its list of recommended, cost-effective charities. Deworm the World is now ranked as the most effective charity, alongside SCI (these remain the only two charities that focus exclusively on NTDs). Against Malaria Foundation has joined GAIN in Tier 3.

Please see here for Giving What We Can’s updated recommendations and explanations of each charity’s ranking.

A mass drive to eradicate polio begins today. See here for the full article.

“More than 85 million children under five years old will be immunized against polio in 19 countries across West and Central Africa in a massive example of cross-border cooperation aimed at stopping a year-long polio epidemic.”

400,000 volunteers will administer two drops of oral polio vaccine (OPV) to every child at the door of every household in 19 African countries. The drive hopes to finally eradicate polio in Africa:

A previous round of campaigns in 2009 did not stop the outbreak completely, as not enough children were vaccinated to stop polio transmission. After years with no polio cases, some countries lacked the necessary skills and experience to respond adequately to the outbreak. New approaches being introduced this year include standardized, independent monitoring of whether children have been reached, better training for vaccinators to carry out the plans fully and appropriate deployment of experienced staff.

UNICEF’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa, Dr Gianfranco Rotigliano noted: “With better coverage that leaves no child unvaccinated, these campaigns can succeed in making West and Central Africa polio-free.”

A recent initiative in Kenya allows farmers to insure their crops against bad weather. Farmers pay an extra 10% for seeds, and register the seed type purchased and location of their plot using their mobile phones. This enables their nearest weather station to be identified.

“Weather stations monitor rainfall amount and distribution in the field, which are then compared with the crop’s water requirement vis-à-vis historic rainfall patterns. In case of crop failure due to drought or too much rain, farmers will receive a text message informing them of a payout“

Apparently, many of the farmers thought this scheme was “too good to be true”! As the article highlights,

“For farmers the biggest risk is weather. To minimize exposure, they tend to use as little inputs as possible. As a consequence, their harvest is below the optimum even when rains are good. Insurance gives them the security of a payout in case of a full crop failure, therefore promoting investment in farming inputs and subsequently improving productivity”

See here for the full article.

UNAIDS’ new program, “Agenda for Action”, seeks to fight the spread of AIDS by advancing women’s rights and empowerment. Read about it here.

UNDP highlight that, “AIDS is the leading cause of death  among women of reproductive age (15-49) worldwide.” As UNDP Administrator Helen Clarke notes,

“We have to see the promotion of women’s rights as intricately, intimately and intrinsically linked with combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic… If we can’t deal with this fundamental issue of the status of women, how do we effectively combat the spread of this epidemic?”

This new initiative will:

• support leadership development for HIV positive women and girls in 30 countries
• support positive women’s networks being fully involved and reporting on the Millennium Development Goals
• encourage countries to put HIV reporting into their reporting under the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW)
• initiate “know your rights” campaigns focusing on the rights of women and girls in a number of countries

Giving What We Can’s research into AIDS interventions found that,

“Education appears to be the most effective way to reduce the number of people will die from HIV/AIDS”

“It would cost $1000 to extend one HIV-sufferer’s life for two years through antiretroviral therapy… But the same $1000 could extend people’s lives by a total of about 950 years if spent on preventing the spread of the disease through mass media HIV/AIDS education”

See here for Giving What We Can’s HIV/AIDS research, which includes a helpful chart sowing the relative cost-effectiveness of different interventions.

Peter Singer has written a thought-provoking article for the Guardian, exploring the sometimes unhelpful psychology of giving. You can find it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/16/haiti-aid-future-damage

The article sheds light on some of the possible reasons that:

“people give generously to earthquake victims, but not to prevent the much larger number of deaths brought about by extreme poverty, insufficient food, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and the absence of even the most basic healthcare”

Singer also highlights some of the problems with the way we tend to give:

“The earthquake killed up to 200,000 people. Terrible as that is, it is fewer than the number of children who… die every 10 days from avoidable, poverty-related causes. Moreover… there are good grounds for thinking that disaster relief is less cost-effective than aid aimed at saving the lives of those who are risk from extreme poverty.”

It has been one week since the official launch of Giving What We Can, and we are delighted to see how it has caught the public imagination. Giving What We Can has featured in on many television and radio programs as well as in dozens of newspapers. We have had over 7,500 unique visitors to the website and more than 60 new people have asked to join.

If you wish to follow some of this press coverage, see:

BBC News
Sky News
The Times
The Guardian
The Daily Mail
The Scotsman
news.com.au
Philanthropy Today
Metro

In the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday, it was announced that:

Draft legislation will be published to make binding my Government’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on international development from 2013.

The 0.7% target was originally set in 1970 by a UN resolution, and has been reaffirmed multiple times. Yet 39 years later only 5 of the 22 countries who made this agreement have met the target, and the UK is currently giving just 0.43%.

This has made many people wonder whether the UK will ever meet this target, and also why we should believe such targets. The proposed legislation to bind the UK to meet its target may turn this around and similar pieces of legislation in the future could help make such targets much more meaningful for the UK and other countries. However, the legislation may still be scrapped before it leaves draft status: it will not be brought into law until after the next election, and is opposed by the Conservative Party.

Giving What We Can is to be launched this evening at a reception at Balliol College, Oxford.