Charity Comparisons

Choosing where to give can be as important as choosing whether to give. This is because some aid programs are much more cost-effective than others, so a well-placed donation can help many more people or help people much more profoundly. Charities working to fight the causes or effects of extreme poverty are typically much more efficient than those fighting problems in developed countries as many of the really cheap opportunities have not yet been taken. However, even among aid programs focusing on extreme poverty, there is more than a factor of 10,000 between the most cost-effective and least cost-effective.1 This is the difference between saving a single life and saving a life every day of your career.

At Giving What We Can we thus take charity effectiveness very seriously, and aim to do as much as possible to help people choose a charity. It can be difficult to compare charities that are working on different things, but we have made a surprising amount of progress. If you just want a recommendation as to where to give, you can skip straight to our recommended charities, but we would like to stress that those are just our current recommendations. This analysis is an ongoing process and not the final word.

There are many ways in which organisations try to help fight the causes and effects of extreme poverty. We have thus divided charities into the following categories:

• Health
• Education
• Water & Sanitation
• Emergency Aid
• Empowerment
• Political Change

So far we have focused our efforts on health-related organisations as they have significant potential to be effective, make up a large proportion of NGOs, and there are comprehensive statistics available on the effectiveness of many of the different types of programs they implement. We have provided a sketch of some of the main issues for the other areas, and will develop our analysis of them further in the future.

It is important to note that our analysis is limited to assessing charities which have a relatively narrow focus. We are thus unable to assess organisations such as Oxfam or MSF which include many different subprograms on many of the above categories. This is an important limitation, but it is worth pointing out that while such organisations may be significantly above average in terms of their cost-effectiveness, they are very unlikely to be right at the top. This is because they spread their resources over many different programs, some of which are more efficient than others. Informed donors can potentially do better if they fund just the most efficient programs.