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Adam Casey

Oxfam is placing itself at the forefront of the push towards evidence-based charity. This is a very encouraging sign from one of the world's largest non-governmental organisations.

In general, one problem that charity evaluators like us encounter is that not enough studies have been done to measure the effect of different projects. The main reason cited by charities for this is that properly conducted 

 (RCTs) are prohibitively expensive. We are regularly asked what our view is of Oxfam, and have previously had to say that we just don't know, because not enough information is collected to assess their impact. This is why we are very glad to see Oxfam releasing data from its new Effectiveness Review.

In September 2011 Dr Karl Hughes published a 

 asking how charities could demonstrate they were being effective without bankrupting themselves. This year Oxfam answered his question by publishing the first results from a new "Effectiveness Review". Oxfam randomly selected a small group of interventions and studied them in depth to get a sense of how effective "typical" Oxfam work is.

Oxfam is currently running 362 "mature" projects. Of these they selected 26 spread across all categories of intervention Oxfam is involved in. 12 community based projects were analysed quantitatively with RCTs and 9 policy interventions were analysed by qualitative methods. Humanitarian projects were analysed in terms of how well they kept to recognised quality standards; 5 interventions were analysed in this way. In addition there are plans for 3 pilot studies looking into the accountability of projects.

Karl Hughes described the conclusions of the Effectiveness Review as "mixed". It is a testament to Oxfam's commitment to transparency that they have published even the unfavourable results. The general conclusion is that most Oxfam interventions make things better, but only on some measures. With further study it is reasonable to hope that Oxfam could dramatically improve their interventions, focusing on projects (like a 

 in Pakistan) which have very strong evidence of effectiveness. Furthermore, they might stop altogether projects that have low or even negative impact, freeing up resources for those projects that work.

The Effectiveness Review was an initial attempt, and it leaves plenty of room for improvement. For instance Oxfam did RCTs only in 12 of the 26 projects they studied. This suggests that there is room to expand the use of the "gold standard of evidence" much further.

The effectiveness review also failed to address the key question that Giving What We Can seeks to answer: How much good can we do at how great a cost? This is a very important point that we hope Oxfam's next Effectiveness Review will consider in detail. However, getting evidence of a positive effect is a very important first step.

There is a lot of good in this report. At the very least, it demonstrates that on average Oxfam has a positive effect. But more than this it tells Oxfam where to focus its efforts. Oxfam now needs to look at the very effective Pakistan disaster risk-management programme and try to replicate its success elsewhere. They also need to look carefully at one of the livelihood projects studied and try to understand why the control group ended up better off than the intervention group.

More generally, this report demonstrates that organisations like Oxfam can take evidence seriously without compromising their work on the ground. It is estimated that each study cost only £10,000 excluding staff time. This is very little, compared with the quarter of a billion that the organisation spends each year. Hopefully this first attempt will inspire Oxfam and other large charities to investigate their effectiveness more systematically. If these studies help Oxfam use its money 1% more effectively, then they will have paid for themselves many times over.

This Review also provides good examples of how to get useful evidence despite difficulties on the ground. In an RCT it is important for the control and intervention groups to be as similar as possible. But this is very hard in practice. For instance in the case of the Pakistan flood risk-management project there were statistically significant differences in the average age, population and distance to market between the two groups of villages. However, Oxfam demonstrated that this need not make the RCTs worthless. By using linear regression and other statistical techniques the report attempted to correct for these discrepancies.

This review was very preliminary, but it offers hope for the future. Key improvements would be a focus on quantified cost/benefit analysis and an expansion of the use of RCTs to a wider range of projects. But the fact that Oxfam has run and published such an extensive study, at a reasonable cost, is a milestone for effective charity. Hopefully other charities will follow their example.

Does Oxfam Help?

Stephanie Crampin

Giving What We Can’s latest media appearance was this morning, in the latest edition of the Sunday Times, written by Nicholas Hellen. Buy a paper copy or read it 

. See below for a glimpse of what this feature contains:

“A PHILOSOPHER at Oxford University who decided to give half his earnings to charity has, over three years, inspired an international movement of generous-minded members of the public to pledge donations totalling £62.4m.

“Toby Ord, 33, a research fellow in ethics earning £39,300 a year, initially promised to give away everything he was paid over £20,000. He has since chosen an even simpler life, giving away everything above £18,000 after tax “because I really don’t need that much”. His wife, Bernadette, a doctor, has also signed the pledge.”

Hellen goes on to illustrate the importance of cost-effectiveness when making charitable decisions, explaining the QALY metric and using the example that the money required to train a guide dog could also cure over 2,000 people of blindness in developing countries. He mentions Toby’s discussions with Oxfam, as well as 10 Downing Street and Andrew Mitchell.

Becky and Owen Cotton-Barratt are also featured. Becky’s decision to donate 1% of her income to Deworm the World and SCI, as a student, and Owen’s to donate 10% of his income are explored, as is the possibility of coordinating taking the pledge and raising a family.

The Sunday Times: Oxford don sparks floods of charity cash

Shaun Raviv

This will be the first of several posts on labour mobility, in which I will be crunching the numbers and exploring an interesting way to help the poor. I will be looking further into the possibility and, eventually, the cost-effectiveness of giving to what may be an under-appreciated method of providing opportunity to the poor in developing nations.

Hundreds of millions of people in poor developing nations say they would move to rich nations such as the US and UK, if given the opportunity. However, developed nations only offer work permits to a small percentage of those who would like them. For example, in 2010, the US Diversity Visa Lottery had 13.6 million applications for 50,000 visas-272 applicants per slot. 

 Allowing people on low incomes to move to wealthy countries can benefit them in a number of ways, including:

Access to public goods such as law and order, or proper sanitation

Access to well-functioning political or cultural institutions.

Moving a person to a country that is better organized and makes use of more advanced technology can increase their economic productivity many times over. Reflecting this, the same taxi driver in Swaziland earns multiples of her previous income if she can do the same job in Switzerland. This is a faster and larger financial impact than that offered by any other health, education, or economic empowerment program I know of.

The effect on those who remain in the sending country is less clear. In addition to being pleased by the success of their friends and family, they will benefit economically from "remittances", which already come to 

 the total amount of aid spending worldwide. The sending country could lose out if its most talented members leave rather than stay and try to improve matters-usually called "brain drain"-though this is an area of active debate.

Of course there is also the feelings of the natives of the receiving country to take into consideration. Some in developed countries take a dim view of immigration, fearing that it will lower wages, or change the social and political culture in ways they may not like. Complementary policies that would help limit these potential problems have been proposed, but they would likely seem radical to the general public in our current political climate.

A more radical proposal, designed in part to avoid troubling locals in receiving countries, is to start new cities, which would adapt the legal and economic systems of well-functioning developed countries. These so-called "charter cities" would become magnets for migrants from developing countries seeking opportunities not available to them where they currently live.

So far this proposal has mostly circled among economists and a 

. The subject came to my attention initially from Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development, who suggested in a 2011 

, "Economics and Emigration: Trillion Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?", that strict migration limits were lowering the total wages earned worldwide by trillions of dollars. The paper also argues that while there may be small pay cuts taken by native workers due to increased immigration, they are minor compared to the benefits to the immigrants themselves. Lant Pritchett made a 

 in 2006 and offered some potential solutions for how to make more open borders appealing to citizens and politicians in receiving countries. American economist Bryan Caplan 

 in 2012 with a paper aiming to refute the main arguments put forward against more immigration, such as protecting domestic workers, taxpayers, and culture. The blog 

 was recently started to build on this literature. Other noted development economists who have indicated enthusiasm for the idea include William Easterly and Paul Romer.

What has attracted me and others to looking at migration as development is the scale of the riches offered by its proponents.

Clemens notes that "the emigration of less than 5 percent of the population of poor regions would bring global gains exceeding the gains from total elimination of all policy barriers to capital merchandise trade and all barriers to capital flows." 

 Pritchett estimates that "allowing an additional 0.5 percent of the rich-country labour force to enter from poor countries would produce gains in the monetary value of all official development assistance." 

 According to these studies, even slightly opening borders would have an impact far greater than expanding free trade to its limits. It may result in greater improvements in welfare for the world's poor than foreign aid spending, and at much lower cost to donors.

These estimates are not inclusive of all costs and benefits to the receiving and sending country, and may not fully take into account what could be significant distributional effects. Nonetheless, they offer a case for taking a closer look and seeing if these claims can stand up to scrutiny.

If I were to conclude that some form of migration represented a highly valuable opportunity to assist the world's poor, what could I actually recommend to Giving What We Can members? Am I just chasing a rabbit down a hole?

While it is harder to fund than health programs, there may be opportunities in both advocacy and research. Research, such as that done at the Center for Global Development, could propose ways in which migration could be organized to more effectively reduce poverty, while still providing benefits to receiving countries. Advocacy could help communicate to voters and politicians the significant impact that migration policy can have on economic development, something they may not currently appreciate. GiveWell noted four of the top 100 independent foundations in the U.S. focus on immigration. We will be looking at these organizations and others to see what type of work is being done in this area.

Furthermore, as a community that wants to help reduce poverty, it is useful to know of cost-effective opportunities to assist the world's poor that are not currently being taken by existing charities. We could encourage new projects in this area and make use of this knowledge during the course of our everyday lives.

There are two other volunteers working on this project along with me at the moment, and together we are drafting blog posts that consider different angles of the issue and looking at what charities work in this area. Out next post will hopefully be on how significant a concern 'brain drain' should be.

We are keen to get assistance, especially from those with relevant expertise. You can get in touch 

Migration as a possible way of helping the poor

Rob Wiblin

For the second year running, one of our recommended charities, 

participating in The Big Give Christmas challenge

, where for every £1 you donate, TheBigGive.org will match it with another £1. Thanks to the immense support shown by GWWC members last year, SCI decided to double their target this year, to £50,000. Match funding was on this morning, and will also be available from 10am on the 7th and 8th of December (Friday and Saturday) until it runs out.

If you have been planning to make your Giving What We Can donations for this year (or indeed, any other donations!), now is a great time to do it. It's also an ideal opportunity to bring up SCI, Giving What We Can, and effective charity in general, with your friends and family - perhaps by posting about the offer on Facebook and Twitter.

Taking part is simple, and you will be told if match funding is still available when you try to make a donation, giving you the chance to stop and come back the following day if funding has run out. Together we can 

contribute to over 1.5 million children in Ethiopia

We have some doubts about whether these matching schemes really increase the impact of your donation as much as it initially seems, which we will write about in a future post. Nonetheless, they probably increase the impact somewhat, so head over and do your Christmas giving now!

SCI matching donations at The Big Give tomorrow and Saturday

Read Giving What We Can, and in particular Toby Ord’s latest media feature in 

this article, ‘Putting Charities to the test’

 by Tina Rosenberg of the New York Times. Rosenberg illustrates Toby’s convincing case for the fact that, at the festive time of year where many charities receive the majority of their donations, considering the effectiveness of your donations could be more important than any other time.

She goes on to discuss the evaluation tactics of GiveWell and Giving What We Can, before pointing out some of the challenges that face the sentiment that cost-effectiveness should be the decision-making factor when considering which charity to give to. The article concludes with a message we all want made clear that the solution to the problem of complicit charities is to be an educated donor, and demand evidence that our charities of choice are spending their donations as they should.

“December is giving season. According to 

 of their annual contributions from individuals arrives between Thanksgiving and New Year.

“How do you decide where to give? People want to give where their money will be used effectively, of course... Overhead does matter. But it is dwarfed by a different question: Is this group’s work effective?

““When people think of giving, they look at the issue of whether a charity has a 10 or 20 percent administration cost, and that makes the difference for them,” said Toby Ord, a researcher in moral philosophy at Oxford University and founder of an organization based there called 

. “But in reality some things they could be funding are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than other things. People never guess there could be such large discrepancies. Instead of a 20 percent difference, there can be a 1,000 percent difference.”

 called “The Moral Imperative Towards Cost Effectiveness,” Ord poses the example of helping the blind... According to 

, the cost of training a dog is around $42,000. So if you had $42,000 to give, you could greatly improve the life of one blind person... But what if instead, you spent that $42,000 on eye surgeries for people with trachoma in Africa? Helen Keller International, which works to prevent blindness, says trachoma surgery 

 as $25 per person and is 80 percent effective. That same money, then, could restore the sight of 1,344 people. If you value all lives equally — and in a minute I’ll get to the fact that we certainly don’t — then if you are training a guide dog, you might as well be giving to a charity that wastes 99.93 percent of its money.

“Ord’s point is that if we care about what our money is doing, we should look for the most effective charities. (His group asks people to pledge to give 10 percent of income to the places where it will be most effective. He has decided he can live comfortably on $18,000 pounds (a little less than $30,000) per year and will give away everything he earns above that.)

“What are the “most effective charities?” Ones that:

Aim to solve the most serious problems (in the normal calculus, this means that providing bed nets to save children from malaria ranks above helping public radio stations or art museums).

Employ cost-effective strategies (trachoma surgeries, rather than training guide dogs, to help the blind).

Are competent and honest. The percentage of donations spent on overhead is one measure of these qualities.

Can make good use of each additional dollar. This is the hardest point to assess, but it asks whether the group has the program on the ground to use your money well, and whether your donation will make something happen that otherwise wouldn’t.

“Most individual donors lack the resources or training to determine which charities meet these requirements. So does Ord, for that matter, so he relies heavily on the research of a like-minded Brooklyn-based organization called 

Givewell “will always choose charities that work in the poorest places, as money goes further there. A tiny amount can do a lot (try getting eye surgery for $25 in the United States) and basic interventions are still desperately needed. “Nobody in the West needs a bed net,” notes Berger. “We’ve eradicated malaria. But a lot of problems we’ve solved continue to exist in other places.”

Rosenberg points out the downsides of basing our charitable decisions solely on cost-effectiveness:

“Following the numbers, however, is not always wise. The numbers measure service delivery, but charities sometimes do very useful things the numbers can’t capture. 

, for example, piloted the use of accompagnateurs in Haiti — community members hired to help people on AIDS therapy to take their medicines. That system is now being used all over the world, producing value that goes far beyond its measurable impact on the Haitian patients.”

She also brings up factors that might affect these decisions other than effectiveness:

“Even if you define effectiveness very broadly, it’s far from the only consideration in choosing a charity. “People care about what they care about,” said Katherina Rosqueta, the executive director of the 

 at the University of Pennsylvania, which helps philanthropists make more effective donations. “If someone cares deeply about closing the achievement gap in the U.S., they won’t be convinced to finance health care in the third world. It would be foolish to think that the only way a donor can do good is to go to the top-ranked, most efficient nonprofits.””

The parting words put at least the above concern into perspective:

“When we do give completely altruistically, we often give nearby — to our local soup kitchens or to help the victims of disasters like Hurricane Sandy. It is normal to value what happens near us more than what happens across the world. But Ord has an interesting response: how much more value do we put on a neighbor’s life than that of someone in Kenya or India? Is it worth 10 times more? Twenty? It’s surely not worth 1,000 times more — so put your money into bed nets.

“Charities are often complicit — they will sometimes choose ineffective strategies like canned food drives because they are more attractive to donors. The solution is to be an educated donor. Charities now publish the percentage of donations they spend on fulfilling their mission. We should demand evidence that they’re spending it right.”

The New York Times: ‘Putting charities to the test’

William MacAskill

GiveWell recently updated their recommended charities. The principal change was that they now have a third top-recommended charity, GiveDirectly, a charity that makes unconditional cash transfers to the very poor in Kenya. GiveWell gave GiveDirectly their #2 ranking - above Schistosomiasis Control Initiative but below Against Malaria Foundation.

My initial reaction to this recommendation was surprise, and, after reading the material available on their website, I remain surprised that they have 

 GiveDirectly to the #2 slot. This post explains why. In a follow-on post, I'll take the opportunity to make some more general comments on things that I find lacking or am concerned about in GiveWell's research and recommendations. Before I begin, I'll note that their blog and website does repeatedly mention that more information will be released soon, so hopefully the issues below will be addressed there. I'll also note that GiveWell takes direct criticism from others as both helpful and a sign of respect, which is exactly how I intend what follows. Finally, I'll caveat that the views below are my own first reactions; they aren't meant to represent the views of GWWC as a whole.

GiveWell mention that cash transfers face an unusually low burden of proof. If that's a low burden of proof for doing 

 good, then I agree. I think that cash transfers would be a reasonable standard of comparison by which to judge other charities - it would be an indictment on the charity if they were performing worse than cash transfers.

However, there are theoretical reasons why direct cash transfers should be less effective than the 

 intervention in the world. There are a number of ways in which we might be able to 'leverage' our resources to achieve a surprisingly large impact, discussed below. Cash transfers do not exploit any of these.

Let us suppose that those in extreme poverty are perfectly rational, with perfect information. Even if so, we should expect people - anyone, but especially those whose basic needs are not met - to use money in order to benefit themselves or their household rather than whatever would have the largest total benefit, including the effect on those around them. That certain goods have positive 'externalities' is not a reason for individuals to purchase them, whereas it should be a reason for donors to purchase them. So by purchasing and providing goods with high positive externalities, the best charities should be able to outperform cash transfers.

Far from being a purely theoretical point, positive externalities actually seem to be key for the best interventions. The best health interventions increase productivity, which benefits the individual but also benefits those around them. In addition, preventing one person from catching a contagious disease prevents them from passing it on to others. Furthermore, parents may not be motivated to invest the socially optimal amount in their children's health and education. Not only does a lot of the benefit of this go to their children into the far future, but higher productivity will help other future citizens of the country. 

 has found that income increases of the extremely poor are often spent making life more pleasant, such as by buying nicer-tasting food, rather than more, or more nutritious, food. This is discussed in an accessible way in the book 

GiveWell have data on how these cash transfers are spent: they could compare the positive externalities of tin roofs with healthcare. All of the points above have also 

 by GiveWell in one of their blog posts, which makes it surprising that this issue wasn't discussed in this release.

The extremely poor can't currently buy albendazole (a deworming drug) for $0.50. Those living in rural areas simply can't access it without using considerably more than $0.50's worth of time travelling. In contrast, thanks to economies of scale, a mass deworming program 

 able to provide albendazole and other drugs for ~$0.50 per treatment. One could respond that the market would provide albendazole if it there was demand for it, but it's unclear whether that's true in the situations in which deworming charities operate. This is at least worth discussing.

Like the issue of externalities, this concern holds even if we assume the extremely poor to be 'perfect' economic agents. But there are predictable ways in which they are not.

An important way in which the extremely poor differ from idealised economic agents is lack of information. How much can we expect the extremely poor to know about the health benefits of consumption of albendazole? Or even the difference between long-lasting insecticide treated bednets and untreated bednets? For the world's poorest people, reliable health information can be too expensive, or simply impossible, to access. This creates a large industry of local practitioners with no medical training who dispense unhelpful or even dangerous advice. For those who would like to learn more, this problem is also discussed in Poor Economics.

Healthcare is often regarded as a case where markets fail because the 'information asymmetry' between the consumer and supplier is so large. For this reason among others, government and non-profit providers play a much larger role in healthcare around the world than they do in most other markets. We should expect, and have plenty of empirical evidence suggesting, that the extremely poor are extremely poorly informed about medicines and healthcare. As a result, it is not foolish to hope that experts could do additional good by promoting or distributing medicines they wouldn't otherwise choose to buy.

This was the issue on which GiveWell focuses in their analysis, in their discussion of whether cash transfers increase alcohol and drug consumption. I personally would expect this to be a case where the poor behave closest to the standard economic model; with so little money, spending choices can be a matter of life-or-death, so the poor will likely think extensively about their purchases given the knowledge they have.

That said, the poor, like most of us, may 

 than we would like. This creates a kind of positive externality: as altruists we care about their future selves as much as their present selves, whereas they might care more about their present selves. There is some evidence, again discussed in Poor Economics, that the poor, under high stress and faced with constant temptation, struggle to save as much for the future as they would like.

I don't take the above theoretically driven concerns to demonstrate that GiveDirectly can't be one of the best charities out there. But they do make me initially skeptical. What surprised me is that GiveWell didn't address or even mention any other than the 'rationality' concern. There was only a discussion of whether the additional cash is used to purchase alcohol or other drugs, or whether it has unintended side-effects like causing jealousy among neighbours.

In addition to the doubts raised above, I had some other concerns with GiveWell's methodology.

My overall impression of GiveDirectly is that the evidence behind it is considerably more limited than either AMF or SCI. One salient instance of this is that, as far as I can tell, GiveWell rely on self-reported data in their assessment of where received cash is spent (where they suggest that 67% is spent on home improvement), in precisely a context where we would expect self-reporting to be misleading. Another is that, though there is extensive economic analysis of cash transfers, this has focussed on "income transfers" rather than "wealth transfers" (to use the distinction that 

), and we might see very different effects between the two.

2. Lack of discussion of cost-effectiveness

One factor that I found very surprising is that there was no almost no discussion of how beneficial the marginal expenditure of cash transfer recipients actually is. How beneficial is it to have a metal roof rather than a bednet? What are the long-term benefits, and benefits to others, of metal roofs, as compared to bednets? This is something on which GiveWell has said more information will follow, so I won't dwell on it. But given the crucial importance of the question, I'm surprised it wasn't discussed in the basic page.

More generally, I was very surprised by the limited discussion around "what do you get for your dollar?" Out of a roughly 8000-word page, only 450 words were dedicated to this question. GiveWell claims to agree with GWWC that one should give to the charities with the best "good out per dollar in" ratio; given this, I would expect them to consider "what do you get for your dollar?" to be the crucial question.

I look forward to understanding better the thinking behind this new recommendation as GiveWell releases more information on the subject. For now, at least, I'm unconvinced.

GiveWell’s Recommendation of GiveDirectly

Giving What We Can

 on economic empowerment to include our latest findings on microfinance as an effective form of giving. It's an intriguing solution to many development problems, and has been heralded by everyone from the UN to the Norwegian Nobel Committee as a wonderful new kind of economic empowerment. Unfortunately, however, there is little evidence to support such claims.

The few methodologically sound investigations of microfinance that exist, and you can count them on one hand, have largely shown that it makes little difference on a large scale - in contrast to the anecdotal success stories that have made microfinance so exciting for some people. One randomised control trial study in the Phillipines actually found that recipients' self-reported well-being decreased compared to the control group. The one bright spark - a study in Kenya which found that a microsavings scheme (as opposed to the normal micorcredits programmes) produced greater business investment and wealth for women - was based on a small sample size of 163, of which almost half didn't even participate in the scheme.

Despite the paucity of evidence behind it, microfinance has attracted a great deal of philanthropic and commercial interest. This makes it even less likely that there is a funding gap for those places with the greatest need and demand for such programmes.

Blog

Does Oxfam Help?

The Sunday Times: Oxford don sparks floods of charity cash

Migration as a possible way of helping the poor

SCI matching donations at The Big Give tomorrow and Saturday

The New York Times: ‘Putting charities to the test’

GiveWell’s Recommendation of GiveDirectly

Why We Don’t Recommend Microfinance

The Community That Stays Together, Gives Together

The Copenhagen Challenge Paper for Education - What does it mean for fighting poverty?

Toby Ord on morality and helping others