Reflections on the $5 Minimum Donation Barrier on the Giving What We Can Platform — A Student Perspective from a Lower-Income Country.

This is incredibly good and generous of you, but also I suspect that even on purely altruistic grounds it makes more sense to save the money for yourself and become slightly less risk averse as a result?

I don’t have a good model or rigorous justification for this, just an intuition 

Hi Habeeb,

I work at GWWC as the Head of Marketing :)

Thank you for your generosity and for sharing your perspective! We are actively interested in how we can help cultivate people giving effectively from all over the world, so this is really helpful feedback for us!

I've asked someone on the team who knows why we have the $5 minimum to follow up in the comments here, so stay tuned for their response. My guess is that with the processing fees associated, it might not make sense for us to support donations less than $5 - but this post will help us challenge those assumptions!

On why we don't have a bigger range of charities to donate to: We have a pretty strict process in terms of the charities we allow on our platform, which you can read more about in our inclusion criteria if you're interested. Basically, we want to make sure that donors have options that are sufficiently high-impact, and that the charities get sufficient value from being on our platform.

Some suggestions on donating smaller amounts:

• If there is a trusted person in the group, you could pool all your money together to be able to reach the threshold of $5, and maybe you could make a collaborative decision on where to donate - this could even be a nice way to help talk about giving and your thought process with friends.
• Wait until you are able to donate the minimum $5, and set aside this money in the meantime.
• Against Malaria Foundation allows donations as low as $2 USD: https://www.againstmalaria.com/Donation.aspx

I also liked the suggestions from others in the comments. I think there's lots of ways to donate and they don't all necessarily go through GWWC!

I appreciate your perspective on wanting to cultivate the habit of donating small amounts but also generally caution that especially for students, that you're making sure you have enough for your own expenses and emergencies first. Making sure that the habit is sustainable is an important factor for long term giving!

Thanks again for sharing this, Habeeb and I'll make sure someone else follows up about the $5 limit!

A great number of EAs in America/Europe could learn a lot from you.

I don't know why GWWC has this limit so can't comment on the request here but I think it's really cool that you're considering donating a significant portion of your monthly income to effective charities despite not earning much (especially compared to the global population). That's a selfless and inspiring act.

P.S. I hope you'll attend EAGxNigeria!

You can donate to AMF via PayPal Giving Fund on this page and to Giving What We Can here. Currently, 100% of the donation amount goes to charity, as PayPal covers all payment processing fees on donations through this portal. I haven't tried making a small donation recently, but it looks like there is no minimum amount you can donate, and users regularly make $1 donations through the Give at Checkout feature. (Caveat: These links may only work in certain countries.)

I've included a screenshot below of the user interface for when you donate, though I didn't complete the checkout so I don't know if it'd work.

(Disclosure: I worked at PayPal from 2021 to 2024.)

I think you can probably do better locally with an EA mindset than by donating through GWWC -- and this isn't a criticism of GWWC!

As a practical matter, a potential intervention needs to have enough room for additional funding and be long-term enough to justify the costs of evaluation and transaction costs, then the opportunity needs to actually come to the attention of GWWC or another organization.

I suspect you'd have access to some highly effective microscale and/or time sensitive opportunities that GWWC and people like me do not. You also are likely to have local knowledge to evaluate those opportunities that people like me lack.

I strongly believe that cultivating a habit of giving, even with small amounts, helps build a long-term culture of altruism

I strongly agree with this! Before I had a stable income, I'd set aside 1€ a month to a separate bank account for charity. Usually, I'd wait a year or more to donate the accumulated money somewhere. (For context, I'm from Northern Europe.) 

Every.org tentatively appears to not have a minimum donation amount.

A number of organizations affiliated with our cause areas are on that platform, I believe.

I don't know about GWWC's minimum specifically, but in NZ $5 is the smallest donation that is eligible for a tax credit. Many charities here use it as a minimum for that reason. Maybe there's something similar in other countries?

It may well be worth lowering the limit even if that's the case, but it's a potential explanation.