My preference within this genre would be for something with more leverage and greater expected impact at the expense of local linearity. I'd especially call out the Center for Global Development, which has a history of policy wins that I think justify its budget many times over, and Target Malaria for work getting gene drives deployed to eliminate vector-borne diseases such as malaria. I'd prefer one dollar to these over multiple dollars to AMF, or the recommendations in the report.

Hi! Writing as a Research Advisor at Founders Pledge and formerly staff at J-PAL. I really enjoyed reading this report and was very impressed by the detail, clarity, and brevity (30 pages isn't short, of course, but this could've been much wordier - it's very to-the-point). Some specific things I found particularly exciting:

(1) The purpose of this report and the goals/values of the donors were made very clear at the beginning and referenced throughout the document. This is surprisingly easy to leave out, especially when writing for a familiar audience (like Effective Altruists) whom we may expect to have identical worldviews to our own.

(2) It was great to see your rationale for selecting your top interventions, as well as the reasons you chose not to select others from Table 1. It helped provide a complete picture of how and why you arrived at your conclusions.

(3) It was interesting (with no positive nor negative connotation - just truly interesting!) to see the GiveWell-evaluated health interventions included in the category of early childhood development. I've never seen them framed in that way, but it made sense to me while reading.

Other organizations you could consider looking into:

(1) BOMA Project, Trickle Up, and BRAC all implement the Graduation approach on the African continent.

(1a) BRAC is, of course, the creator of the approach and a very impressive and evidence-focused organization. I think it would be worth getting in touch with BRAC to see if donors of this size could earmark support to the Ultra-Poor Graduation Program in Uganda.

(1b) BOMA Project implements a version of the Graduation approach in a few countries, with most of its work in Kenya. I don't know them well, but they're often speakers at conferences with sessions on the Graduation approach and related social protection programs.

(1c) Trickle Up also implements the Graduation approach on the African continent and elsewhere. I have a positive impression of them from a few meetings with their M&E team, but don't have deep knowledge about their programs so can't recommend for or against.

(2) BRAC's Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescents program is also something that might be of interest. It's been studied with RCTs in Uganda and Sierra Leone (the latter study is really interesting as it took place during the Ebola outbreak) and found to have positive results on income and education levels. I've never seen a cost-effectiveness analysis, but the SL RCT notes that the program "has proved to be scalable and cost-effective across countries" (p. 11).

(3) J-PAL's Innovation in Government Initiative (IGI). I'd guess this was left out because it fits into the "evidence-based policy" category, but the competitive nature of the fund means that the projects it supports are more like TaRL Africa's work (specific, discrete technical assistance to meet policymaker demand) than generic advocacy. IGI is the recommended charity from Founders Pledge's report on evidence-based policy, and fits the "transformative" criterion in a slightly different way - enabling the transformation of entire government programs that are designed to improve lives.

A few notes and questions I had while reading:

(1) Did you assess try to assess organizations’ track record/strength when making these recommendations? From my experience, both TaRL Africa and Village Enterprise are exceptionally strong, evidence-based organizations with strong leadership and implementation on the ground. It could strengthen your recommendation to include a note about their commitment to evidence use and generation, local partnerships, etc.

(2) For Village Enterprise in particular, it would be good to mention the Sedlmayr, Shah, and Sulaiman (2018) study that directly compared VE's program with a cost-equivalent cash transfer in Uganda. This can help bolster your reasoning for selecting them over GiveDirectly (although the cash only results were really noisy and hard to interpret - I hope an updated paper will be released sometime soon).

(3) I was confused about your cost-effectiveness estimates for TaRL until I looked at the linked spreadsheet. The intervention can vary along a number of axes, and both the costs and impacts will vary based on the local context and population served, so I wasn't sure what a cost-effectiveness estimate for the TaRL approach meant. I see from the spreadsheet that your cost estimates came from the studies with Pratham in India - I think it would help to clarify that in the document itself.

Thanks for your work on this. One charity to consider is Raising Voices, which I think fits their mandate exceptionally well (and which I also think should be considered by the wider EA community).

Full disclosure: I'm a former employee of Raising Voices.

RV has a program to prevent violence against children in schools. It is well-evidenced - there are now more than 25 peer-reviewed papers, including RCTs and cost-effectiveness evaluations, available on their VAC prevention program. They are based in Uganda, and their theory of change explicitly focuses on empowerment. They currently reach 750 schools across Uganda, and are currently scaling up across the country. Their work also has the potential for wider impact, since they lead several global coalitions. This sum would be significant in the context of their annual budget. Preventing violence in schools is good in itself, but there is good evidence that it relates to positive physical health, mental health, educational and economic outcomes.

Nice work! This seems like a pretty great overview of our current understanding of a whole range of international development interventions, at least on the micro end of the spectrum. Useful not just for your donors, but the community as a whole.

Two quick points. First, in your appendix you write that it would be interesting to see a rigorous evaluation of Jeff Sachs' Millenium Village Project. DFID did fund a big evaluation of that project which returned pretty negative results. Marginal Revolution discusses that here, plus there's a paper by Gelman et al. cited at the end of the MR post.

Second, I do think there's a bit of tension between the part where you write "the donors are comfortable with impact within the next 1 to 20 years or so, but not keen on options like R&D and policy advocacy which may or may not have an impact at all" and your recommendation of TaRL. As you note, it's completely possible that J-PAL's work to scale up TaRL across Sub Saharan African will fail. The line between policy advocacy and policymaking support is pretty blurry.

I don't want to discourage you from recommending TaRL because I think it's great! And of course you can't evalute everything. But I'd be interested in your thinking about what differentiates TaRL advocacy from advocacy for better health or macro policies, which you've largely excluded.

Because you're recommending Village Enterprise, I'd also flag TechnoServe, which runs similar programs and is the top-rated poverty alleviation charity by ImpactMatters. It's worth noting that ImpactMatters only evaluated (I believe) TechnoServe's Impulsa Tu Empresa program, which operates exclusively in Latin America, but the organization runs analogous programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Obviously, those might not be similarly cost-effective, but a prima facie basis for making that assumption (rather than the opposite, for instance) isn't obvious to me.

Looks good from a quick read-through.

To make an obvious point, as relevant information (including about new charities/causes) will presumably improve a lot over the next 5 years, there seems a case for updating your recommendation annually rather than the donors committing upfront to donating 5 years' worth to particular charities (if that was the idea).

Depending to some extent on whether a 5-year commitment is essential for the programmes being donated to. If it is, a middle way might be to commit upfront to donating for 5 years subject to the programmes achieving XYZ goals, to be independently assessed each year.

Another obvious point (which you mention of course): the extremely wide range of the TaRL and salt iodization cost-effectiveness figures, from far below 1 (Founders Pledge estimate) to far above, would give me concerns as a donor that these are poorly understood interventions.