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A five-minute conversation has the potential to prevent 40 lives being lost. That's about how long it takes to explain the basic precepts of the Giving What We Can pledge to someone.

When we talk about charities, we often use numbers, since we want to give a concrete idea of how cost-effective a charity is (because our charities are some of the most cost-effective in the world!). On our website, for example, we say that it costs $3,500 to avert a child’s death through “interventions supported by AMF” and $1.26 to treat a child through “interventions supported by SCI”. But why use such convoluted language?

Throughout the month of July, Giving What We Can is running our Tell a Friend campaign, in which we encourage our members and supporters to start a discussion with their friends about effective giving.

Give Directly has decided to test  a universal basic income intervention in Kenya: they’re planning to provide about 6,000 people with unconditional transfers for at least 10 years, transferring money to all residents of the villages which will be targeted by the intervention. This has received a lot of attention from the media, with the trial being mentioned, among others, on Slate, Vox, The Independent and Der Spiegel.

In 2014 the number of displaced people exceeded 50 million for the first time since the Second World War. It’s now up to 60 million. This poses a particularly large problem for Europe, since refugee applications to the EU doubled between 2014 and 2015.

Giving What We Can focuses on finding the charities which result in the most benefit to the greatest number of individuals. But should we give more weight to benefitting the worst off? Should we care more about equality and distributive justice?

A recent study asked people in the US what they thought the global median income was: participants thought it was $20,000 per year - 10 times more than it actually is.[1] Respondents who were then told that the true global income distribution is much more unequal, i.e. that the global median income is much lower, supported higher spending on foreign aid and cuts in agricultural trade protections at larger rates. They also made donations to charities abroad that were 55% larger relative to people in the control group.

Have you ever wondered whether the Giving What We Can pledge is right for you? Do you have unanswered questions which make you hesitate about signing up?

Our largest trust payout yet — 77 malaria deaths prevented, food for thousands fortified, 100 people’s incomes doubled, and a quarter of a million children dewormed!

In today’s world the rich are getting richer, they give less to charity — particularly internationally! At the same time, 896 million live on less than USD 1.90 per day and 3 million children die each year of basic preventable diseases.