Tl;dr
Take a pledge. Just do it. 1% for 1 year. Calculate what that would mean for you right now. What do you have to lose?
Why I donate
I still remember. I was seventeen when a friend sent me Peter Singer’s TED talk. I watched it and the lens through which I saw the world was changed forever.
For the first time, I understood the sheer, almost absurd privilege of what it means to be “normal” in a high-income country. My parents were part-time primary school teachers. We were never “well off”. But globally we were among the richest people on Earth. That realisation was both humbling and slightly disorienting. Not because we had done anything wrong, but because so much of life’s lottery is exactly that: a lottery.
The second thing I learned that day was something even more empowering: our donations can do an enormous amount of good. Not hypothetically, not vaguely, but measurably.
This combination: privilege + tractable impact was so striking to me. I haven’t been able to forget it.
That day, I took the 🔸10% Pledge.
At the time, I had no real income. I was a student. So I donated £10 a month (1% of my spending money) to the Against Malaria Foundation. It felt tiny. It also felt empowering (genuinely). Giving became a habit before I even had a salary. Later, when I started earning and started giving 10%, it was astonishingly easy. I had never got used to that last 10%, so I never missed it.
Over the years, giving has become one of the things I value most about how I live my life. It’s shaped my identity, my career, and my sense of purpose. I’m proud of it not because it makes me “a good person” (that’s not how I see it) but because it’s a part of my life where I can trace unambiguous positive impact from a simple, consistent action.
Here’s what my donations have done so far:
- Protected around 100 families from malaria
- Prevented roughly 700 tonnes of CO₂e (about 700 transatlantic flights’ worth)
- Doubled the annual income of 12 families in extreme poverty
- Seed-funded roughly 5% of a new high-impact charity’s first year budget
- Multiplied the impact of some of my giving by supporting high-leverage fundraising organisations
- Supported research and advocacy aimed at reducing factory farming and global catastrophic risks
- And (most meaningful to me) saved the life of at least two children under five
On paper, it’s all numbers. But I often try to imagine an actual child. Someone who will grow up, go to school, laugh, fall in love, argue, dream, fail, recover, build a life, all because some stranger in another country chose to act on a moral intuition that most of us already have.
And that’s really the point I want to make this week.
Why I still donate (still after almost a decade)
Working at Giving What We Can for the past couple years has only deepened my conviction that significant, effective giving is one of the highest-leverage choices any of us can make. I’ve been lucky enough to visit charities on the ground (in both India and Nigeria) and I’ve seen the scale of the challenges firsthand.
A child born in Nigeria is 27 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday than a child born in the UK.
In India, millions of children miss routine vaccinations despite vaccines being free.
These aren’t abstract statistics. They are the background conditions of daily life for people with the same hopes and fears as any of us.
And yet the solutions are often incredibly simple. Mosquito nets. SMS reminders. Vitamin A supplements. Small cash incentives. Evidence-based interventions that are boring in the best possible way.
Sometimes the world feels impossibly complex. But helping others effectively can be easy.
I donate because I have more than I need to enjoy a good life and the impact of what I can give is so huge.
If you’re someone who’s already donating: thank you.
If you’re someone who’s been meaning to donate but hasn’t quite started yet (or you’ve been thinking about giving more effectively) now is the time to do so.
And if you’re on the fence about taking a giving pledge? My advice is the same today as it would have been when I was seventeen:
Just do it.
Not because you should feel guilty. Not because it will make you special. But because you genuinely can make a difference and almost nothing in life offers return on impact quite like this does.
If you’re hesitant, or curious, or want to experiment, try the 🔹Trial Pledge. 1% for 1 year. I challenge you to calculate what that would mean for you right now. What have you got to lose? You might be surprised by how meaningful it becomes.
And if you’re ready to make effective giving a consistent part of your life: join us.
Join the 10,000+ people across 100+ countries who’ve decided that a world with less preventable suffering and less existential risk is something worth building together.
I’m grateful every day that I started giving when I did. I’m pretty sure, if you choose to start now, future-you will feel the same.