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Larissa Hesketh-Rowe

A huge thank you to all of our members for all of your contributions to our recent pledge campaign which has seen 318 new members join Giving What We Can. This blog post gives some information on what to do next if you are a new member.

Welcoming over 318 new members to the Giving What We Can community

Happy 2017! We’re probably a bit late to say that but so much has happened in January already that it seems to have raced by.

 which saw 318 new members join Giving What We Can and 114 start Try Giving. This took us to 2575 new members by the end of the pledge campaign but today we're already on 2,629 members! A big welcome to all the people who are new to our community.

This has been our best campaign yet, December was a record breaking month with 171 new members joining in that time and yet this month we’ve already had 190 new members take the pledge. The image above (a huge thanks to volunteer José for designing it) is based on our dashboard data (see the graph below), the spike at the very end shows December and January, our recent pledge campaign.

We’re really excited to see our community growing so quickly. Together we’ve already donated over $20 million to highly effective charities which is a staggering amount. In 2015, (the most recent year for which we’ve conducted our full giving review) members recorded over $1.3 million just to the 

 this could have prevented as many as 425 premature deaths from malaria!

Most commonly our new members from the pledge campaign noted that they first heard about Giving What We Can from their friends which is a great testament to all of our current members who have been spreading the word. Thank you so much for supporting us and encouraging others to give more and give more effectively. These extra donations mean more children safe from malaria, better quality of life for people suffering from various neglected tropical diseases, less animals suffering in factory farming and more progress on preventing existential risks. This is what our work is all about. If you’d like tips on talking to your friends about Giving What We Can we have lots of resources and ideas on 

It’s been fun being involved in such a lively and creative campaign but now our focus is getting to know our new members better and working out how to support them.

If you are new, there a few important things you can do now.

Now that you’ve pledged to give 10% of your income (or 1% of your spending money while you’re a student or unemployed) to the organisations that can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others, it’s good to get into the habit of giving early. If it is financially viable for you, consider setting up a direct debit to a charity to come out of your account just after your pay cheque, that way it’s easier to budget and you won’t forget.

If you’re unsure about where to donate have a look at 

 to find top organisations that are working the most promising areas.

You can also make your donations go further by finding out about things like tax deductibility for charitable donations in your country. We've written up some 

If you have any questions please feel free to 

We ask all of our members to record their donations in 

. This helps you see what your money is achieving and whether or not you’ve met your pledge for the year. This is our main source of data for assessing the impact we and our members are having so it’s really important we get as much information as possible.

We are all trying to do the most good we can by donating a significant portion of our income to effective organisations. This means we’re part of a growing community all working towards a similar goal. If you need help with something, have questions or want moral support you have a community of over 2,600 Giving What We Can members to draw on, not to mention over 30,000 people who’ve signed up to the Effective Altruism newsletter because they want to improve the world. A few of us from the Centre for Effective Altruism (which runs Giving What We Can) will also be in touch with new members about chatting on Skype. If you’re already a member and haven’t spoken to one of us feel free to request a Skype by emailing 

Join the Giving What We Can community group on Facebook

 to stay up to date on developments in research and from the community.

Class of the pledge campaign 2016/2017: a community support experiment

One thing we also trialling to help support and connect our members is setting up cohorts for our new members by join date. This means giving you an online space where you can talk to people who joined at the same time as you, swap tips on things like giving and budgeting and share experiences of being a new member. We’ll also post information to help new members with getting started. Things like where to donate, how often and how to budget.

We’re trying this out with everyone who joined during the pledge drive (Tuesday 29th November - Tuesday 10th January) so if you joined Giving What We Can in this time and haven’t received your invite 

If this group finds it useful we’ll consider creating Facebook groups for cohorts of future new members so there is always somewhere to go for introductory resources when you join.

A huge thank you again to everyone who has been involved in our pledge campaign and to those of you who have newly joined because you want to use your donations to improve the world as much as possible. We are regularly humbled by this community and look forward to hitting the next milestones (3,000 members isn’t far away!) together.

Marinella Capriati

How we talk about what donations will achieve

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?

There is a reason why we don’t just say “AMF averts a death for $3,500” or “SCI treats a child for $1.26”, and that’s the fact that our charities are not the same as the interventions they’re part of. They’re actually often a part of a chain of actions which lead to, for example, one child being treated for schistosomiasis for every 

 spent along the way or one death being averted for every 

It’s important to say that we think that having charities work in this way (performing small tasks rather than the whole intervention) is often a good idea: it means that charities can easily plug gaps that can occur in large-scale interventions.

To demonstrate the difference between a charity and its related intervention, take the 

, one of Giving What We Can’s two Top Charities. The intervention AMF works on is bed net distribution: providing long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets to people in developing countries to help fight malaria. Specifically, AMF buys nets, delivers them to local partners in those countries and supports the monitoring and evaluation that comes after the delivery of the nets, in order to make sure they’re being used correctly. There are parts of the overall bed net providing process that AMF does not do: it does not distribute the nets to individuals, and it does not conduct the surveys needed beforehand in order to tailor each net delivery to each region. That’s done (and paid for) by AMF’s local partners.

For another example, take Giving What We Can’s other Top Charity, the 

. It works on the overall intervention of providing de-worming treatments, and it does that very specifically by providing the technical support needed for the government distribution of the drugs needed. Pharmaceutical companies produce and donate those drugs; again, SCI is part of a chain.

Cost-effectiveness of the overall intervention

Since our charities only perform one link in an intervention’s chain, it makes sense to judge a charity’s cost-effectiveness on the effectiveness of the entire chain rather than the effectiveness of that particular charity on its own. After all, some small organisation performing admin for some intervention can be the most efficient in the world, but if the overall aim of the intervention is to shred money, we wouldn’t want you to give to that organisation!

What will happen if you donate $3,500 to AMF or $1.26 to SCI?

 that deworming treatments as an overall intervention (of which SCI is a part) cost $1.26 per child treated. But if you give $1.26 to SCI, that money on its own won’t treat a child: it’ll go towards the vital technical support needed to treat about 2 children. Other donors will add other necessary resources, and 

, you can expect to treat a child for $1.26.

 that the cost of averting a child’s death through bed net distribution as an overall intervention (of which AMF is a part) is $3,500. However, if you donate $3,500 to AMF, that won’t avert a death on its own. It will buy a load of bed nets. Other “non-private” donors to AMF (like Concern Universal or DFID) will then provide resources to deliver the bed nets to local partners (and provide support for the follow-up), and the local partners will do the rest. 

, you can expect to save one life for every $3,500 committed to bed net provision overall.

It would be so much easier if we could say that, by donating a certain amount of money to an effective charity, you’d be expected to avert a death! The more complicated truth is, for example, that if you give $3,500 to AMF, then you will buy 

 protecting around 2520 people and averting the deaths of 1.8 children (according to the 

Donations to our Top Charities are absolutely vital, though. Those nets need to get bought by AMF, and those governments need the support SCI provides. Without donations like yours, the necessary work of organisations like AMF and SCI cannot be done, the gaps which we know exist in the vital intervention processes which they support would not be filled, and the whole intervention wouldn’t work at all. So thanks!

Kramer Thompson

Oliver Rawle

Spreading the word this July: Engaging friends with a Charity Giving Game

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.

We’ve done some research and found that talking to a friend is the single most common way in which new members hear about Giving What We Can. By just discussing effective giving with a friend, you may be placing them on the path to becoming an effective altruist. But how can we best communicate to our friends the difference between giving and effective giving?

Those who are new to effective giving probably rely on intuitions to assess charities. They may think that the most effective charities are the most honest ones, or that they should be donating to charities which speak to them on a personal level. But these factors do not determine whether or not a charity actually makes an impact, or how cost effective a charity is. Instead, a charity’s impact and cost-effectiveness is determinable by weighing up, 

, how much it costs to run the charity, how significantly the charity helps those in need, and the severity of the problem that the charity is ameliorating.

We know that engaging a friend about effective giving may feel overwhelming, so throughout July Giving What We Can is publishing tips and information about having these conversations on our blog and 

. Our first tip is to open a conversation about effective giving by sending your friend a Giving Game.

, in which you are given information about a charity, asked whether or not you think the charity is effective, and then shown what studies have established about that charity’s effectiveness.

Also, to give an example of effective giving done right, the game also introduces two of the world’s most effective charities: Give Directly and the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). At the end of the game, every player will choose one of these two proven effective charities to receive a $5 donation, so each player will make an impact. We will be funding up to $1000 in donations, so that’s 200 people we can reach out to!

Please share this game with your friends! By spending a few minutes working out how well they can guess charities’ effectiveness, they’ll already make sure $5 is donated to an effective charity. But even better- this could be a great way of introducing them to effective altruism; it’s sometimes surprising how seemingly similar charities can vary drastically in their effectiveness, and for many people, that’s enough of a spur to find out more about giving effectively. If you introduce a friend who ends up committing to lifelong effective giving, that’s a massive amount of good you’ve helped do, so it’s really worth giving it a go.

http://www.apaththatsclear.com/diy-charity-assessment.html

What’s so special about GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot? 

 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 

In this blog post I’ll try to give this news some context, by comparing this intervention with some alternatives. I will start by considering other types of transfers that can be made in the context of development interventions, looking at in-kind transfers and conditional cash transfer. Then I will focus on unconditional cash transfers, and specifically the ones that GiveDirectly has been delivering up until now, and explain what’s different and interesting about their new basic income pilot.

Part of international development aid is about re-distributing resources to people living in poverty. But while this seems pretty straight-forward, it is in fact not easy to work out exactly what type of resources we should move, and how they should be moved.

Traditionally, much development aid has focused on 

, that is, on the provision of specific goods and services. This might include very disparate things: from cattle, books or food, to schools and hospitals. However, some argue that 

providing cash might be better that providing in-kind aid.

 There are several arguments for this thesis, but here I’ll just mention two points. First, providing cash can be 

 This is becoming increasingly true thanks to new electronic ways of moving cash: for instance, GiveDirectly makes transfers through mobile phones, which can be cheaper than in person distributions.

 Secondly, providing cash generally leaves recipients more 

 This is good because recipients might have better information about what would be most useful for them.

However, some do not think that in-kind aid should be substituted by cash transfers. Part of the disagreement is rooted in worries about recipients 

 (what are sometimes referred as ‘temptation goods’). In fact, however, evidence suggests that this worry is 

: the evaluation of GiveDirectly’s cash transfer program shows no increase in spending on temptation goods.

Other worries seem to be more pressing: supporters of in-kind transfers argue that some essential services (such as hospital, roads and schools) 

bring benefits to people other than the recipients

 (they lead to what economists call “positive externalities”): for example, hospitals and school are likely to increase levels of health and education, and healthy and educated workers are likely to be more productive, which would in turn benefit not only them, but also the wider population. Goods which have positive externalities are likely to be 

, so might not be adequately provided through cash transfers.

Interestingly, however, cash transfers are not always offered as an alternative to public services. Sometimes, transfers are used with the specific intent of increasing the uptake of these services. This is the case of 

: transfers which are conditional on the satisfaction of certain behavioural requirements, generally concerning the health and education of children resident in the recipient household. For instance, Mexico’s “Oportunidades” conditional cash transfers programme, provides cash transfers to households conditional on their children regularly attending school and making health clinic visits.

, which means that transfers are made without any condition being set.

We have written extensively about the advantages and disadvantages of conditional and unconditional cash transfers in our new report on 

. The (really short) summary is that conditional cash transfers lead to 

 than unconditional cash transfer: more people employ education and health services, which increases workers’ skills, knowledge, and experience. However, unconditional cash transfers have the advantage of 

 households simply because they may not meet certain behavioural requirements and allow vulnerable households to identify their own needs

. They also have lower administrative costs than conditional cash transfers, since there is no need to verify that the conditions have been met.Because of this, unconditional cash transfer have received increasing attention as a tool for international development.

Other types of unconditional cash transfers

GiveDirectly provides beneficiaries with unconditional cash transfers

 - they transfer low-income households a certain amount of money, without any condition attached. They have been doing this for a while, and have mainly worked in Kenya and Uganda.

Yet, many people seem to be pretty excited about GiveDirectly’s news that they will be testing a basic universal income and their announcement of the pilot has received a large amount of media attention. 

So what is so different about their new basic income program?

First of all, the basic income pilot will provide transfers to 

all full-time residents of treatment villages

 Up until now, GiveDirectly has been only providing transfers to some people in target villages. However, some evidence suggests that an increase in the mean wealth of the village is correlated with a significant decrease in life satisfaction among individuals in households that did not receive transfers.

 By targeting all residents, universal basic income might avoid this problem.

Secondly, the basic income pilot will provide 

smaller and regular transfers for 10 years

. While the details of the pilot are yet to be defined, the payments are expected to amount to somewhere between $250 and $400 a year per person

. In contrast, GiveDirectly’s has so far made one-off transfers of about $1000. This change is interesting because having a transfers for longer time might give people the security needed to take more risks and invest a larger portion of their resources, which might enable them to increase their income in the long run.

GiveDirectly universal basic is unlikely to be able to substitute the provision of public goods, or lead to as much investment in human capital as conditional cash transfers would. However, it is likely to be a cheap and flexible way of transferring resources, that can provide an inclusive safety net for people living in poverty. It will also avoid decreases in life-satisfaction for households not receiving transfers (since all households in target villages will receive transfers) and might give recipients more financial security to make investments, and increase their longer term income.

Michelle Hutchinson

Using aid to finance the refugee crisis: a worrying trend  

In 2014 the number of displaced people exceeded 50 million 

for the first time since the Second World War

. This poses a particularly large problem for Europe, since refugee applications to the EU doubled between 2014 and 2015.

Thankfully, many European governments have stepped up to help. 

 registered around a million asylum seekers in 2015 - achieving this by speeding up processing time for people both from safe countries of origin and those from particularly unsafe countries of origin (especially Syria).

Unfortunately, this help has too often come directly out of Official Development Assistance (ODA) budgets (i.e. from national aid budgets). An Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) directive allows funding a refugee’s basic needs in a host country to count under ODA for their first year in a country, and a number of countries are taking advantage of that. (See page 2 of 

) The graph below shows how this directive has combined with the refugee crisis to lead to countries drastically reducing funds they are actually spending on overseas aid.

This trend is deeply troubling because it is comparatively expensive to settle refugees in countries like the UK. The costs to settle a refugee vary widely depending on the host country, but they’re on the order of $10,000 per year. (See page 3 of 

). When you consider that this is setting up a person with a new life, it isn’t that expensive. Yet when we compare how much we could otherwise be helping people with that money, the grave injustice becomes apparent. As one example, iodising salt to prevent iodine deficiency is estimated to cost 

 Providing this for children is estimated to produce an additional 50 years of schooling per $100, since iodine deficiency hinders cognitive development. And iodine deficiency is still very prevalent in countries that host most of the refugees such as 

Using the ODA budget to settle just one person for a year, then, prevents us from helping literally hundreds of children in equally bad situations to get a better education. It is still an extremely good use of money - but we should be finding that money elsewhere (perhaps through a 

Although there has been piecemeal news coverage of ODA budgets being used to settle refugees, there has been scarcely any coverage of this as a wider trend, and of the scale of the problem - highlighted by the graph above. Indeed, hosting or processing refugees now uses 9% of ODA - 

double the percentage it did the year before.

Some people argue that immigration is actually good for the host country, such that it seems as if 

spending money on settling immigrants is not actually ‘assistance’ at all.

 But even assuming that to be false, the striking unfairness of rich countries being unwilling to settle refugees from their own budgets rather than what is set aside for assisting poorer countries is brought home by the comparatively low burden of refugee intake borne by Western European countries and the USA compared to countries like Lebanon and Jordan:

How can we improve the situation? If we can raise awareness of this trend, we may be able to put pressure on governments to avoid it - to find alternative sources of funding for processing and settling refugees. The ONE campaign has 

 aiming to do just this. Writing publicly about this trend and why it’s problematic (whether on your own blog, or for your local newspaper), could also be helpful. More broadly, showing your support for international aid, such as by supporting 

 could help prevent aid money from being reallocated.

In the longer-term, the increasing evidence base about the efficacy of direct cash transfers in humanitarian crises may lead to their increasing adoption as a way of supporting people nearer their place of origin. A promising sign of increased popularity is the President of the World Bank 

speaking out about the importance of increasing their use

. Supporting GiveDirectly might be helpful in continuing this trend.

The number of displaced persons in the world today presents us with a significant humanitarian crisis. But we must avoid compounding the crisis by diverting aid spending. Hopefully, by 

 that we care about the issue, we can reverse this worrying trend.

James Snowden

Is Charity About Helping the Poorest?

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?

Giving What We Can aggregates the benefits to different people 

 rather than giving extra weight to worse off individuals. While our top charities tend to help some of the worst off people in the world, we do not explicitly factor considerations of fairness and equity into our cost-effectiveness calculations. There are good reasons for this:

. It can be very complex to add together different benefits and also weight them differently for different people. This is why academic literature on cost-effectiveness tends to aggregate benefits additively.

. Aggregating these benefits additively relies on the ethical intuitions everyone actually has. While egalitarians care about the distribution of benefits, they also care about total benefits. Different people may have very different ideas about how much weight to place on considerations of equity. It is easier to add your own weighting than to adjust ones that we have assumed.

. Those who are worst off are usually the easiest to help as there are more “low hanging fruit” so to speak.

 is the only plausible ethical theory (as has sometimes been suggested

). But we do think that aggregating benefits additively provides a good starting point, which can then be supplemented by considerations of equity and fairness if required

. We are aware that many of our members (and staff) think that prioritising helping the worst off may be of 

 reasons (for the purposes of this post we will refer to both as egalitarian

). Recently, we’ve been thinking more about how our recommended charities fare on these ethical dimensions.

If aggregating benefits in an additive or egalitarian manner always came to the same answer (as it often does), that would be the end of the matter. Occasionally however, we may have to make a tradeoff between helping people who are worse off or helping a larger number of people. This post is intended to give the reader some additional considerations, which may help them think about how to weigh egalitarian concerns in choosing the most effective charities.

Additive benefits are the most important consideration when choosing an effective charity

. However, when the cost-effectiveness of charities is sufficiently close, it may be reasonable to factor in considerations of fairness and equity.

All our top charities fare well on considerations of fairness and equity

. This is unsurprising given that they are all charities which help children with preventable diseases in poorer countries.

Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) fares particularly well

Blog

Welcoming over 318 new members to the Giving What We Can community

How we talk about what donations will achieve

Spreading the word this July: Engaging friends with a Charity Giving Game

What’s so special about GiveDirectly’s basic income pilot?

Using aid to finance the refugee crisis: a worrying trend

Is Charity About Helping the Poorest?

Median GDP per capita: how much does the typical person earn in different countries? A look at Global Inequality

Everything you always wanted to know about the pledge (but were afraid to ask)

More than half a million pounds moved to top charities in Q1 2016

Why should I give if the rich don't?