Get involvedShare our ideas: Help inspire othersKey facts and resources

Key facts and resources

Background

Many of us really care about effective giving, but find it difficult to talk about it with friends, family and acquaintances. A survey in early 2016 asked what resources Giving What We Can could develop to support these conversations. It found that almost 70% of respondents would find it helpful to have a summary of key facts.

Differences in costs between interventions

  • Blindness
    • Training required for a guide dog and its recipient: $50,000.
    • Surgeries to reverse the effects of cataracts in developing countries: around $1000 per patient.

More on our comparing charities page.

The cost of averting deaths

  • NHS would consider it cost-effective to spend £20,000-£30,000 for a year of healthy life.
  • The cost of averting the death of a child under five through a bed net distribution supported by AMF is estimated at about $5000 by the charity evaluator GiveWell.

Malaria and AMF (Against Malaria Foundation)

Malaria kills around 600,000 people a year, many of them children under five.

  • GiveWell estimates that:
    • the average cost to provide one net through an intervention supported by AMF is around $5.
    • the cost of averting the death of a child under five through an AMF-funded bed net distribution at about $5000.

Does aid work?

  • Some does, some does not, which is why it's important to rely on expert research when deciding where to give!

A success story: smallpox

  • Total cost of eradication was about $400 million.
  • More than 100 million lives have been saved so far.

An unsuccessful story: PlayPumps

Case Study: PlayPumps International

Imagine hearing about an organisation — PlayPumps International — dedicated to bringing clean water to people in need. And not only is this organisation doing something important, it has a unique approach: making water pumps that double as merry-go-rounds. Children simply have to play on the merry-go-round, and this provides clean water for communities — eliminating the hard work of pumping water manually while simultaneously providing entertainment for the children!

If you think this sounds great, you’re in good company. PlayPumps rose in prominence very quickly, winning a World Bank Development Marketplace Award, receiving millions of dollars in American aid money, and getting attention from several celebrities including Laura Bush and Jay Z. It wasn’t until 1800 PlayPumps had been installed that some major issues came to light.

It turned out that children did not actually enjoy playing on the pumps; they required constant force to work and many injured themselves or became sick from the spinning. One organisation estimated that children would have to “play” for 27 hours each day to meet PlayPumps stated goal of providing water for 10 million people via 4,000 pumps. Furthermore, each pump costs about $14,000 to install (considerably more expensive than the hand pumps they replaced). Because children did not find the playpumps as entertaining as anticipated, the hard work of pushing the pump often fell once again to the village women, who tended to prefer the old manual hand pumps; they were easier to push and provided five times more water per hour than the PlayPumps.

The case of PlayPumps shows (painfully) that intuitions and good intentions are not enough. Millions were poured into the initiative before its issues came to light. But there’s a greater cost here: with so many suffering, the stakes are high. When we spend money on one thing, we can’t spend it on another.

In the case of delivering clean water, for the cost of just one playpump, a program like Evidence Action’s Safe Water Now (for which the evidence base extends well beyond intuitions) could have provided clean water to over 9,000 people for an entire year.

General support for the success of cost-effective aid:

  • The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated that between 2000 and 2014 the $73.6 billion spent on child health by donors (both private and public) averted the deaths of 14 million infants and children. This is in addition to the $133 billion spent on child health by low- and middle-income country governments, which is estimated to have averted the deaths of 20 million children.

Resources

Please see our resources page for a more up-to-date list.

Talks

Helpful posts, articles and webpages

Books