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Discussion: How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It?August 7, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment

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How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It?How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It?

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Reporter Amy Costello is leading an online discussion about evaluating charities with IqbalDhaliwal (MIT’s Poverty Action Lab), Dayna Brown (CDA Collaborative Learning Projects) andHolden Karnofsky (GiveWell).

When people find out that I reported from Africa for many years and am now producing a series called Tracking Charity, they frequently ask me this:“Which charities do you think are doing really good work on the ground overseas?”

Honestly, I have trouble answering.

Certainly, many charities are doing good work, but even after all my years covering conflict, food crises, HIV/AIDS, and refugees, I still find itdifficult to define effective aid. How should one measure success? Should all charities keep overhead low, or can high expenses be justified if theyallow a charity to hire the best people? Even if an aid program improves lives in the short term, might it create a culture of dependency in the longrun?

Thursday, August 8, we’re giving you the chance to discuss these and related questions with people who have devoted their careers to

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Discussion75 comments for “Discussion: How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It?”

answering them. I’ll be moderating the conversation and will be joined by:

Iqbal Dhaliwal, an economist who grew up in Delhi, is director of policy at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. When people ask himwhere to donate money, he advises, “Don’t just think process, but think of the final impact that you are interested in.”

Dayna Brown is director of the Listening Program at CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, a nonprofit in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She isco-author of Time To Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid.

Holden Karnofsky is co-founder of GiveWell, a nonprofit that conducts cost-benefit analyses of charities “to help donors decide where to give.” Agraduate of Harvard University, he previously worked in the hedge fund industry.

Our discussion will take place in the section below where you can leave your questions and comments. You can follow the discussion as it evolves bysubscribing to the comment thread by RSS, or by clicking “Subscribe via email” at the bottom of the discussion box.

Amy Costello

Amy Costello hosts Tiny Spark, a podcast that investigates the business of doing good. She is a formerAfrica correspondent for The World and has reported for PBS FRONTLINE/World. She is currently producing TrackingCharity, an investigative series for The World.

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amy_costello • a month agoGood morning to our panelists, Iqbal, Dayna and Holden! Thank you for joining today'sdiscussion. Panelists, please introduce yourselves and answer this question by hitting"Reply": What's the biggest misunderstanding out there about what makes aid effective?

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Iqbal Dhaliwal • a month ago> amy_costelloThanks Amy and PRI for hosting this discussion on a very important topic. TheJameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) started as a center at MIT’s economicsdepartment with a mission to promote evidence informed development policy.Our network of 87 professors from 42 universities have ongoing or completedevaluations of over 400 programs in about 40 countries. I lead the policy group atJ-PAL that tries to make the research results more accessible to implementers,policymakers, donors, and the civil-society, and works with them to scale-upprograms and policies that are found to be effective.

These underlying programs are designed and implemented by NGOs,foundations, governments and the private sector with varying degrees of inputsfrom policymakers, researchers, local communities, donors, and otherstakeholders. Using rigorous impact evaluations, our researchers working in thefield, try to understand what policies and programs work or not, and why, thusgenerating original evidence that can be used by implementing organizations anddonors to make decisions based on hard evidence and not just rely on instinctsor ideology, or selective anecdotes from the community.

To answer your question about common “misunderstanding about

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Holden Karnofsky • a month ago> amy_costelloThanks Amy! I am the co-founder of GiveWell, which aims to find outstandinggiving opportunities and publish the full details of our analysis to help donorsdecide where to give. We've spent years looking for charities that donors can giveto and be confident of their impact, and we've found it to be a huge struggle. Ithink the biggest misunderstanding out there is simply overestimating how muchis known about effective aid. Many people imagine that as long as the charitythey're supporting is well-intentioned, honest, isn't spending too much onoverhead & fundraising, etc., that their money is well spent and accomplishinggood. In reality, we know very little about how most aid programs affect thepeople they're trying to help. It's hard to collect good data, it's hard to generalizefrom data, and it's hard even for someone in the field to really connect with andunderstand people with radically different cultures and living conditions. We'vetried to find the "easiest" bets for donors - cases in which we can answer nearlyevery question might ask - and even for these (our top charities), there are hugenumbers of unanswered questions.

That isn't to say the challenge isn't worthwhile. I believe that aid does a great dealof good in aggregate, and the track record of health interventions in particular isstrong. But assessing the isolated impact of a particular organization is verydifficult, and there aren't established reliable methods for doing so.

amy_costello • a month ago> Holden KarnofskySo fascinating, Holden. I, too, have struggled to find reliable data on manywell-intentioned initiatives. And it's especially hard to evaluate the impact

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