I'm sharing Effective Giving Institute India (EGII), an independent research project I've been working on that investigates the possibility of developing an evidence infrastructure for institutional philanthropy in India.
India has one of the world’s largest mandatory corporate giving ecosystems - enabled by its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) framework. I’ve been thinking about whether independent public evidence infrastructure could help institutional funders allocate that capital more effectively - sharing my thinking here in the openly here.
It started by reading the work of organisations like GiveWell and Founders Pledge. It made me wonder if something similar could work for institutional funders in India, seeing how evidence-based thinking could improve philanthropic allocation.
India’s mandatory CSR ecosystem deployed Rs. 34,908 crore (approx $4.2 billion) in FY 2023-24 across 27,188 companies. Most of this capital is allocated without any independent, publicly available evidence of the relative effectiveness of interventions. The infrastructure to allow institutional funders to ask "what interventions are actually worth funding"? is not available as a public good in India.
This is not like the individual donor problem that GiveWell and Founders Pledge work on. Institutional funders, whether CSR teams, corporate foundations or family foundations, are constrained by regulatory constraints, governance structures and accountability requirements that require a different kind of evidence product.
If there was an independent public evidence infrastructure for India’s institutional philanthropy ecosystem - including evidence quality, cost-effectiveness analysis and contextual adjustment for India’s regulatory and delivery context - then more philanthropic capital would flow to interventions that actually work.
I have written a methodological paper on how EGII thinks about the evaluation of social interventions. It presents the hierarchy of evidence and the approach of cost-effectiveness and contextualisation of global research for India. This is a working document and I expect it to be wrong in places.
It's an idea being tested in the public domain - with a methodology paper, a website and some conversations with a few researchers and practitioners. I just submitted a proposal to Coefficient Giving’s RFP on Effective Giving. One idea they explicitly mentioned is to work with corporate social responsibility arms of companies to direct funds to highly effective charities, which is closely adjacent to what EGII is exploring. I’m putting this out there because I believe this work needs to be collaborative and supported in order for it to grow.
Website: egii.netlify.app
Methodology Paper: https://egii.netlify.app/EGII_Methodology%20Paper_v1.pdf
Would love to brainstorm, collaborate, or just have a conversation with anyone who finds this interesting or wants to think it through together.
