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

Sam Deere
3 min read
11 May 2016

We’re really excited to announce our largest quarterly payout to our top charities ever. In the first quarter of 2016 Giving What We Can members, supporters, and our broader community donated more than half a million pounds (nearly three-quarters of a million dollars) to the Giving What We Can Trust.

Figure

In expectation, that works out to 77 malaria deaths prevented, food for thousands fortified, 100 people’s incomes doubled, and a quarter of a million children dewormed.

To be precise, we paid out £505,820.17 (≈US$733,388.66) to our top charities and other highly effective organisations , including:

  • £152,379.05 (≈US$220,942.00) to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is enough to distribute 41,608 insecticide-treated bednets. Even though there is substantial uncertainty around these estimates, Givewell estimates that this might prevent 77 deaths of under 5 year olds in expectation.
  • £98,067.29 (≈US$142,168.15) to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative and £82,382.68 (≈$119,430.17) to Deworm the World Initiative, which together will help to deworm around 262,100 children from parasitic worm infections.
  • £78,177.05 (≈US$113,343.36) to Project Healthy Children, which will support developing countries to incorporate micronutrient fortification into their food supply chains. Project Healthy Children is one of our ‘promising charities’ which means that it’s hard to quantify their impact with certainty, but we think it’s likely to have a very high impact, as potentially hundreds of thousands of people will consume staple foods like flour and oil that are fortified with vitamins and minerals.
  • £84,243.39 (≈$US 122,018.13) to GiveDirectly, of which 84.5%, or $103,105, will be transferred directly to the very poor, with the rest going to support their continuing monitoring and evaluation projects. This means that around 100 of the poorest people in Kenya and Uganda – people who live on less $1.90 a day now, will now be much more food secure and will have greater opportunity to invest in their futures by buying assets such as animals and iron roofs.
  • £10,570.71 to other highly effective charities, including Innovations for Poverty Action, Development Media International, and Iodine Global Network.

These figures don’t include donations by members made directly to top charities, or through partners like Transnational Giving Europe. As the chart below shows, most donations were from people coming to the Trust directly from our website, with a significant minority referred from GiveWell, payroll giving sources, or directly from a recipient charity.

It’s also very cool that about 63% of these donations are being made by non-members, which means we’re not just reaching people who have already taken the pledge, but are seeing members of the wider community taking the opportunity to donate more effectively too.

Thanks everyone who’s contributed to the efforts of some of the most effective charities in the world — here’s to Q2 being even bigger!

More info about the Giving What We Can Trust

Our Trust is a convenient way to support several highly-effective charities at once, and you don’t have to be a Giving What We Can member to use it. Because the Trust is a registered charity in the UK, donors can claim Gift Aid on donations to it — including those designated to overseas-based charities like Project Healthy Children, GiveDirectly, or Innovations for Poverty Action.

Here’s the full list of the highly effective charities you can support by donating to the Trust:

You can sign up to donate to the Trust here, and you can make both one-off or recurring donations. For more information, check out the Trust FAQs.

If you don’t live in the United Kingdom you can still use the Trust, but your donation won’t be tax deductible. See our Donations page for direct donation links to our Top Charities.

Together, Giving What We Can members are making a huge difference — if you’d like to join us, why not try giving or take our pledge?