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
Malaria Consortium: 42,470 cases of malaria prevented, with an estimate of 59 deaths averted.
Helen Keller International: 297,322 vitamin delivered, with an estimate of 74 deaths averted.
Against Malaria Foundation: 59,464 nets provided, with an estimate of 54 deaths averted.
Part B
The charity I would give $1,000 to is Helen Keller International because it is the most cost-effective. It enables a large amount of vitamins to be provided for little expenses, and this economic stability enables the actions undertaken by this charity to last over time. So I believe that Helen Keller International is not only the most effective instantly, but also the one that can last over time, since it requires less donations than the others for more impactful results.
Part C
I would probably focus on human rights, in particular humanitarian law and examine which intervention methods are the most cost-effective in case of war and armed conflicts.