Julie Faller, Senior Program Officer at GiveWell, joins the discussion on enhancing livelihoods programs. She delves into GiveWell’s new focus on evaluating economic empowerment versus health outcomes, highlighting the importance of community perspectives. The conversation explores innovative funding approaches, the spillover effects of cash transfers, and the necessity for tailored interventions. With a renewed emphasis on moral weights in grant decisions, Faller advocates for flexible funding to increase impact, ensuring that diverse needs are met in the ever-evolving landscape of charitable efforts.
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Moral Weights Guide Evaluation
GiveWell uses "moral weights" to compare saving lives versus increasing income but acknowledges these weights are not objectively true.
This framework guides cost-effectiveness but requires judgment and research into what people value most.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Hire Specialist for Livelihoods
Hire dedicated staff focused on livelihoods to deepen research and improve grant efficiency.
Building networks and strategic capacity enables better funding decisions by understanding the sector deeply.
insights INSIGHT
New Cost-Effectiveness Threshold
GiveWell will apply a relaxed cost-effectiveness threshold for livelihoods reflecting alternative moral weights valuing income gains more.
This allows funding programs that health-centric evaluations might deem less cost-effective but valuable under different ethical views.
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GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question?
In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about why GiveWell is dedicating more capacity to researching livelihoods programs that aim to increase people's incomes. They discuss how we're building on existing work, searching for new cost-effective opportunities, and exploring more of the impactful programs we've long cared about.
Elie and Julie discuss:
A new funding threshold: GiveWell uses a framework of “moral weights” to compare different outcomes across interventions, but they are a necessary tool and not an absolute truth. To account for this, we’re using a different cost-effectiveness threshold for our expanded livelihoods portfolio. This enables us to evaluate and fund programs that would appear as cost-effective as our standard recommendations to a donor who values income gains twice as much as our standard model.
How we’re expanding our livelihoods work: GiveWell is hiring a dedicated Livelihoods Program Officer to lead a more focused search for impactful livelihoods programs. This increased capacity will allow us to develop a long-term livelihoods strategy, build an expert network, and collaborate directly with implementing organizations to find and co-create promising programs.
Some areas we plan to explore more deeply: Promising areas for investigation include programs that create positive economic “spillover” benefits for entire communities and community-driven development projects. We’ll also analyze results from our previously funded research on interventions like footbridges and eyeglasses to understand the potential impact these programs could have if scaled.
Our new program officer will lead the search for livelihoods opportunities over the next year that meet our high bar for funding, and we plan to keep growing this research if it proves successful. We’re excited that this expansion of our research team will allow us to explore more of the impactful opportunities that we—and our donors—have long cared about.
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