Part A (20 mins.)
In this exercise, we’ll imagine that you’re planning to donate to a charity to improve global health, and explore how much you could do with that donation.
GiveWell is an effective altruism-inspired organization which attempts to identify outstanding donation opportunities in global health and development. Using this tool to estimate your future income and Givewell’s reports on their top charities, try and work out what you could achieve if you donated 10% of your lifetime income to one of these charities.
If you’re short on time, here’s a sheet with information about three top GiveWell charities. If you’d like to explore further, check out GiveWell’s cost effectiveness models.
Complete this exercise for three GiveWell charities, writing down your answer like, e.g.:
Malaria Consortium: X cases of malaria prevented, with an estimate of N deaths averted
Part B (10 mins.)
In the last section, you ended up with a few different options. Now imagine you were given $1,000 to donate to only one of these charities.
There's a difficult judgment to be made now: since you have to pick, which charity would you donate to to do the most good?
Now write down your answer to the following questions:
Which charity do you pick to donate to? Why?
Part C (Optional, 10 mins.)
What are other decisions in your life that you might consider generating quantitative estimates and comparing outcomes for?
Part A. 114 lives saved [Medicines For Malaria] 163 lives saved [Helen Keller] 114 lives saved [New incentives]
Part B. I would go with Malaria Consortium. Even though the cost effectiveness of Helen Keller international is higher, the impact isn't exceptionally good. Malaria affects a large number of people and the death rate is higher. Moreover the room left for finding for Malaria Consortium is also higher. We have to make sure we help a large number of people with promising impact. This might be contrary to the decisions of other people but it's based on careful observation.
Part C. I'm interested in the field of medicine. I'm willing to work in the same area. Poverty kills people and mostly the reason is lack of resources for treatment and prevention of deceases. We can treat lack of nutrition via medicine which will not only affect individual lives but will also drastically improve economy.