“Are our Top Charities saving the same lives each year?” by GiveWell

Author: Adam Salisbury, Senior Research Associate

In a nutshell

We’ve had a longstanding concern that some of our top charity programs, including insecticide-treated nets, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and vitamin A supplementation (VAS), may have less impact than we've estimated due to “repetitive saving.” These programs provide health interventions to the same children under 5 years old annually or every 3 years. Our cost-effectiveness models currently assume that different lives are saved each year from these interventions. We think it's possible the programs are actually saving the same, high-risk children over and over. In a worst-case scenario, this could mean the programs are saving 80% fewer cumulative lives than we thought.

Based on a shallow review of empirical evidence and talking to experts, our best guess is that we're only overstating the total lives saved by these programs by around 10%, because:

• Under-5 deaths [...]

---

Outline:

(00:12) In a nutshell

(02:46) What's the issue?

(06:44) What did we find?

(11:53) How could we be wrong?

(14:31) What's the issue?

(17:35) Why we don’t think this is a big concern

(18:22) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk

(20:42) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population

(25:12) Modeling these drivers

(34:08) Sensitivity checks

(35:35) Outside the model checks

(37:34) How could we be wrong?

(40:28) Are we returning children to normal life expectancy?

(42:34) Driver 1: Skewness of mortality risk across the life cycle

(43:43) Driver 2: Persistence of the at-risk population

(48:13) Moral difficulties raised by the life expectancy question

---

First published:
June 18th, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jNAFTJWpKK89pisaQ/are-our-top-charities-saving-the-same-lives-each-year

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.