Where to Give
Deciding to give to charity is a commendable choice, but deciding which charity to give to is just as important and often more difficult. Some charities can be as much as 1000 times more effective than others, and since you want to do the most good possible with your money, deciding where to give can be a big decision.
Since beginning our research, we have devised a reliable methodology for assessing charities and their programs. We use a top-down method whereby we decide which interventions seem to be the most promising and work downwards from there to find the most cost-effective charities. Unlike other charity evaluators, our focus is not on the overhead costs of a charity; instead, we measure their programs in terms of how much they do to reduce poverty and improve people's wellbeing for each dollar they receive. Comparing charities that work across a broad spectrum of interventions is not a simple task, and there are many different factors that we consider when evaluating them. In order to make our research easier, we have divided charities into the following categories:
- Health
- Education
- Water and Sanitation
- Emergency Aid
- Economic Empowerment
- Political Change
- Climate Change
Our research initially focused in most depth on health-related organisations, due to the extensive evidence available showing that some health-related programs are extremely cost-effective. However, we are now broadening our research to investigate many other areas, for example political advocacy and climate change.
At Giving What We Can, we have spent a lot of time researching the most cost-effective interventions in the field of poverty alleviation. Our aim is to make giving cost-effectively as easy as possible, as we realise that this can be a hard thing to judge by yourself. Our research has shown the following three charities to be unusually cost-effective, so we strongly recommend donating to them.
For more details on these charities, see our Recommended Charities page.
