Edit: GiveWell's Response at the Bottom

A past event has shown how reputation damage to one EA entity can affect the entire movement's credibility and therefore funding and influence. While GiveWell's evaluation process is thorough, it largely relies on charity-provided data. I propose they consider implementing independent verification methods.

Reliance on coverage surveys

GiveWell performs no independent verification of their charity's claims to draw their conclusions. However they do do a downward adjustment.

• Malaria Consortium's seasonal malaria chemoprevention program: -2%
• Against Malaria Foundation: -4%
• Helen Keller Intl's vitamin A supplementation program: -17%
• New Incentives' conditional cash transfers for childhood vaccination: -2%

This feels lacking.

Getting numbers that are closer to reality not only increases the cost effectiveness calculation accuracy but also reduces the risk of adding a new entry to their mistake list.

Suggestions to shore it up

• Mystery evaluators conducting unannounced site visits
• Independent surveyors (potentially hiring former charity employees) collecting impact data
• Creating funding opportunities for third-party monitoring organizations. GiveWell have already been involved in market shaping

GiveWell is an important cornerstone of the movement and thus preserving its reputation should be further explored to see if more could be done.

GiveWell's Response

GiveWell would also like to improve in this area. Some work has already been done. However, this year our cross-cutting research subteam, which focuses on high-priority questions affecting all intervention areas, plans to improve our coverage survey estimates. Examples of work we’ve done to address our concerns with coverage survey estimates include:

• Our research team is working on a project to identify, connect with, and potentially test different external evaluator organizations to make it easier for grantmakers to identify well-suited evaluation partners for the questions they’re trying to answer.
• We recently approved a grant to Busara Center to conduct a qualitative survey of actors in Helen Keller Intl’s vitamin A supplementation delivery, including caregivers of children who receive vitamin A supplementation.
• We made a grant to IDinsight to review and provide feedback on Against Malaria Foundation’s monitoring process for their 2025 campaign in Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• For New Incentives, we mainly rely on the randomized controlled trial of their work to estimate coverage, which was run by an independent evaluator, IDinsight. Only recently have we begun to give weight to their coverage surveys.
• We funded a Tufts University study to compare findings to Evidence Action’s internal monitoring and evaluation for their Dispensers for Safe Water program, which caused us to update our coverage data and consider funding an external coverage survey.
• Our grant to CHAI to strengthen and support a community-based tuberculosis household contact management program includes IDinsight to evaluate the program through a large-scale cluster randomized control trial (cRCT) and process evaluation.