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?
A.
I would go for Malaria Consortium, which, from the information I have read, has interventions at the earliest possible age of children, to provide anti-malaria drugs and immunization of infants, and are likely to avert so many deaths. There will be prevention of sickness for millions of children, and probably 50% or more lives saved, of the total population of children. when children are young, their immunity is quite low and it is better to save lives at that tender age. Adults have higher immunity levels, so other interventions can be used with adults.
If immunization against malaria is recommended soon, the impact will be even greater.
B.
With only 1,000 dollars, I would donate to Hellen Keller International because of the low cost of one dollar per vitamin distributed. This would have a greater impact from the available total funding.
C.
Other issues I would like to consider include issues of both Legal and Medical interventions, especially where one must be done without ignoring the other.