GiveWell’s cross-cutting workforce works to enhance GiveWell’s grantmaking by tackling complicated analysis questions that minimize throughout grantmaking areas, reviewing our analysis and grants, and guaranteeing transparency and legibility in our findings. This submit explains extra about our workforce’s position, how we predict our work helps GiveWell’s grantmaking, and our present areas of focus.
What does the cross-cutting workforce do?
GiveWell’s analysis workforce goals to search out and fund probably the most cost-effective giving alternatives in world well being and improvement. Whereas our grantmaking groups are targeted on funding packages of their particular areas (malaria, vaccines, diet, water, livelihoods, and new areas), the cross-cutting workforce addresses analysis questions that span throughout completely different areas of our work.
We do that in just a few methods:
- Tackling thorny questions that minimize throughout grantmaking areas. This contains: How ought to we use cost-effectiveness estimates to make grant choices when these estimates have a lot uncertainty?[1] Are we overestimating the cost-effectiveness of our prime charities by double counting lives saved annually?[2] Are packages that improve subjective well-being less expensive than our prime charities?[3] How giant are non-mortality advantages of prevention packages (e.g., long-term earnings will increase[4] or medical prices averted[5])?
- Rigorously testing our conclusions. We “crimson workforce” our grantmaking to search out holes in our analysis,[6] make grants to organizations to check key assumptions,[7] seek the advice of outdoors consultants on our findings,[8] have interaction with and reply to critiques of our work,[9] and experiment with completely different approaches for soliciting suggestions, similar to criticism competitions.[10]
- Making our analysis clear and clear. We set requirements for the legibility of grant pages and different analysis write-ups.[11] This contains offering easy variations of our cost-effectiveness analyses, specific estimates of uncertainty in key parameters, and “outside-the-model” issues (similar to studying worth or organizational monitor report).[12]
Why do we predict this work is essential?
The cross-cutting workforce’s priorities depend on a number of hypotheses about what makes for good grantmaking choices throughout GiveWell. We expect:
- Addressing cross-cutting questions might change our grantmaking. We expect we’ve neglected some essential issues in favor of analysis that extra instantly impacts grantmaking. Turning our consideration to those questions might change our thoughts or reveal errors.[13]
- Exterior views and outdoors analysis can change our minds. We expect extra enter from a variety of consultants will strengthen our evaluation and assist us determine oversights, and we needs to be looking out for methods to fund analysis that might take a look at our conclusions.[14]
- Transparency and legibility are important to creating good choices. We expect clearly explaining our reasoning exposes gaps and invitations scrutiny. When our logic is tough to comply with, that’s a crimson flag. We expect it’s essential to legibly clarify each the rationale for particular grants and likewise broader facets of our worldview.[15]
- Consistency checks are priceless. Having groups specialize by program space might danger inconsistent decision-making throughout grantmaking areas.[16] We expect systematic comparisons might floor discrepancies that we should always examine.
What are some questions we count on to share extra about within the close to future?
We’re prioritizing work within the following areas:
- “Lookbacks” that assess how effectively earlier grants have gone. We’ll work with grantmaking groups to publish lookbacks on roughly $190 million in current grants to packages for chlorination, vitamin A supplementation, and conditional money transfers for vaccination. We additionally plan to publish lookbacks on how profitable our roughly $120 million in technical help (TA)[17] grantmaking has been (in areas like syphilis screening and remedy for malnutrition).[18] These lookbacks will look at whether or not grants achieved their meant affect, whether or not TA addressed key implementation boundaries, and whether or not our assist elevated intervention protection.
- Some long-standing questions on our analysis. This contains:
- How ought to we cope with ongoing questions concerning the high quality of illness and mortality burden knowledge underlying our cost-effectiveness fashions?[19]
- How ought to we mannequin the impact of packages like seasonal malaria chemoprevention, nets, vitamin A supplementation, distribution of oral rehydration answer, and others once they’re delivered concurrently in the identical space?
- How ought to we examine the affect of packages that present trendy contraception to people who goal to extend earnings, cut back morbidity, and avert deaths?
- How involved ought to we be that the organizations we fund are diverting healthcare employees from the federal government?
- How involved ought to we be about insecticide-treated nets getting used for fishing?
Plans for follow-up
We plan to report again in 2025 to share what we’ve finished and what we’ve discovered. We’d be keen to listen to any suggestions or questions within the meantime!
