Global Poverty-Full Report

Written by Colin Aitken

Report depth:

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See our summary here.

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What is the problem?

“Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential as a human being.” ¹

It is difficult to convey just how serious the problem of global poverty is.

Its human cost is almost too high to imagine. Every night children go to sleep hungry, toddlers die of curable diseases, and desperate men and women find themselves exploited by human traffickers and other bad actors.

There are no words to fully describe the suffering poverty leaves in its wake.

There is no heartrending anecdote that captures the scale and severity of its evil.

There is no way to comprehend just how heavy a burden we’ve asked the global poor to carry.

But there is something you can do to help them carry it.

The good news is that poverty is on the decline. Technological innovation, political and economic reforms, and international aid have significantly reduced the fraction of people living in poverty over the past few decades. Billions of people have meaningfully improved their lives, and we celebrate every single one. 

The bad news is that we still have a long way to go. 648 million people live on less than $2.15 per day, ² and 4.52 billion live on less than $10 per day. ³ More than one in five young children has experienced stunted growth as a result of hunger, ⁴ and five million children die each year from poverty-related diseases. ⁵

Every single one of those children was beloved by God. And if we are to be his church, we are called to love them too. This report shares a bit of what we’ve learned about how best to follow our Christian calling to serve the global poor. We hope it’s helpful as you put your faith into action.

Our Recommendation

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. [...] If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.” ⁶

We think global poverty is a top priority area, and one we recommend to most of our readers.

 We think most of our readers should consider:

• Donating sacrificially to a charity that effectively serves the global poor. 

• Inviting others to raise money for the global poor (e.g. hosting a church fundraiser).

For maximum impact, we recommend donating to GiveDirectly, Evidence Action, or Village Enterprise.*

GiveDirectly

Evidence Action

Village Enterprise

We think readers who feel called to use their careers to serve the global poor should consider pursuing:

• A career at a nonprofit that serves the global poor

• This is a particularly good fit for readers with skills in logistics, operations, management, or fundraising.

• Working for evidence-based nonprofits or bringing a trained, evidence-based perspective to existing nonprofits could both be very high-impact opportunities.

• Graduate work in economics or related fields to help discover which interventions and policies best serve the global poor.

• This is a particularly good fit for readers with strong quantitative or qualitative research skills.

• Government or think tank positions to shape policy in an evidence-based way that benefits the global poor.

• This is a particularly good fit for readers who already have policy expertise, or are willing to spend time developing it.

• An unrelated, high-earning career selected for greater income from which to give sacrificially to a nonprofit doing effective work.

We think readers with decision-making power in Christian and secular NGOs serving the global poor should consider:

• Partnering with quantitative and qualitative researchers to evaluate the impacts of their current programs and find ways to make them more effective.

• Using existing evidence to find the best interventions to fit their goals and context.

• Giving people in the communities they work in real decision-making power.

• Setting up robust systems to receive feedback from the people they’re serving.

What is our recommendation based on?

Biblical themes:

"God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions." 

Ron Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

• There are more than two thousand bible verses about God’s heart for the poor and the Christian duty to pursue care, mercy, and justice for the poor and marginalized.

• Particularly strong commandments concerning serving the “least of these” (Matthew 25:31-46, 1 John 3:16-18)

• God is frequently portrayed as an advocate for the oppressed (e.g. Psalm 9:9, Psalm 12:5, Psalm 72:12-14)

• Jesus describes the gospel as “good news to the poor” and promises blessing for the poor but judgment for the rich (Luke 4:18, 6:20-23, 16:19-31)

Christians Past and Present:

• Christians throughout history and across a wide range of denominations have affirmed that serving the poor is a key part of Christian ministry. ⁷
• Christians today have been at the forefront of evidence-based approaches to fighting poverty. ⁸

Strong secular evidence:

• Our approach to fighting poverty is based on research from experts at Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and more! 

Evidence Base

We believe in an evidence-based approach to charity, which lets donors be confident that their money is as effective as possible in helping the people they want to serve. Our recommendations are based heavily on research from GiveWell, a highly respected organization that uses the best available evidence to identify opportunities for donations that help the most people per dollar spent. Other good sources of evidence on poverty-fighting interventions include the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and Innovations for Poverty Action. 

The truth in social science is often nuanced and intricate, and a single study is rarely able to give a full picture, so we recommend that organizations pursuing evidence-based approaches partner with experts rather than try to sort through it on their own. 

Scale

Global poverty is an enormous problem.

• 648 million people live on less than $2.15 per day. 4.52 billion live on less than $10 per day. ⁹
• More than one in five young children has experienced stunted growth as a result of hunger. ¹⁰
• Five million children die each year from poverty-related diseases. ¹¹

Neglectedness  

Billions of dollars per year are spent on global poverty. The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has a budget of around 29.4 billion dollars for 2023, ¹² while in 2022 the World Bank disbursed nearly 50 billion dollars in loans to low-and-middle-income countries.

These numbers look a bit smaller if you account for the fact that most of the world’s 7.8 billion people live in poverty, and more than half a billion live in extreme poverty. That means that even if USAID devoted their entire budget to fighting extreme poverty, they could only spend around $50 per person. If they tried to serve everybody making less than $10 per day, they would only have about $6.50 per person! 

Our recommended charities have a proven track record of serving the poor, but do not currently have enough money to fully scale up their interventions. You can help provide the resources they need to reach people they would otherwise not be able to. 

Solvability  

Some aspects of global poverty are extremely solvable and primarily need more money. Donors can feel confident that our recommended charities really improve the lives of the global poor. Others are currently quite difficult and will require real breakthroughs in research, logistics, and human cooperation. We recommend these to a small group of very motivated readers who are willing to devote their careers to solving challenging problems alongside the global poor.

Nonprofits Effectively Serving the Global Poor

Disclosure: I (Colin) am currently working on a study that has received funding from GiveWell’s (discontinued) Incubation Grants Fund. This report reflects my own opinions, and I have not discussed it with anybody else involved in the study.

We recommend that most donors who are passionate about serving the global poor donate to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund, which directs money to the world’s most effective charities so they can serve even more people. 

Christine and Thadee sharing a laugh in Muganza, Rwanda. They used the money they received from GiveDirectly to install a metal roof on a section of their house. Metal roofs require an upfront payment, but save money and prevent disease in the long run.    [image source]

Based primarily on research by GiveWell and Innovations for Poverty Action, we currently recommend the following three charities as “top picks”, which we believe are unusually impactful in serving the global poor:

• GiveDirectly is a nonprofit which sends money directly to the world’s poorest households. This is a good option for donors who want a charity backed by strong evidence of impact that seeks to maximize beneficiaries’ agency: instead of donors deciding what’s best for the people they give to, GiveDirectly’s recipients choose which of their own needs to prioritize.
• Village Enterprise works to alleviate poverty in East Africa, implementing a widely-studied Graduation Approach to helping program participants start businesses, combining training, cash grants, savings groups, and mentorship. This general approach has a strong evidence base, and Village Enterprise’s implementation in Uganda has been studied by researchers from Innovations for Poverty Action, who found evidence that the program increased consumption, income, and cash inflows (and increased consumption more effectively than unconditional cash transfers in this particular setting.) ¹³
• Evidence Action is devoted to scaling evidence-based interventions to fight against poverty and the global burden of disease. Currently they have three main programs:
• The Deworm the World Initiative distributes medication to fight childhood worm infections that keep children out of school. There is some evidence that this has enormous effects on these children’s incomes when they grow up, ¹⁴ although this evidence is more contested than that for our other top picks. ¹⁵
  • Other good deworming charities include the END Fund’s deworming program, Unlimit Health (formerly the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative), and Sightsavers’ deworming program
• The Dispensers for Safe Water program places chlorine dispensers near water sources that parents can use to sanitize their water and prevent childhood illness and mortality. The effects of this kind of program are the subject of ongoing research, but preliminary results indicate the possibility of substantial reductions in mortality at low cost. ¹⁶
• The Accelerator program finds, tests, and scales new effective interventions in the fight against global poverty.
• Overall, Evidence Action is a good fit for donors who are willing to accept some risk that future studies will change our view of these interventions in exchange for the possibility of having an enormous impact. (Evidence Action is also unusually responsive to disappointing evidence for a major charity: when research showed that their No Lean Season program did not work as well as expected, they ended the program and redirected staff and resources to interventions the evidence pointed towards being more likely to succeed. ¹⁷ )

We recommend that readers interested in research or careers fighting global poverty consider organizations in the “Development and global health” section of this list as a starting point. The list was developed by 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit that helps people identify high-impact careers. 

Deworming medication helps children keep healthy, stay in school, and earn more money when they grow up!   [image source]

We are not currently aware of any explicitly Christian organizations with the demonstrated poverty-fighting impact of our top recommendations. Readers who want to encourage research and innovation among Christian charities may be interested in groups like International Care Ministries (ICM) and others, who have made steps towards establishing a culture of evidence and evaluation in religious nonprofit circles.

ICM partnered with researchers Gharad T. Bryan, James J. Choi, and Dean Karlan to run a randomized evaluation of ICM’s Transform program, who found that the program’s religious component increased recipients’ incomes and religiosity in the short run, but found no evidence of a long-term income or religiosity increase or an effect of the secular part of the program. ¹⁸ Since then, ICM continues to run a number of randomized trials to test and adapt their programs. (You can see results from some of them here.) While this evidence base is not as compelling or robust as the evidence supporting our top picks, ICM’s commitment to rigorous evidence and transparency about their results is commendable, and we believe ICM is a good fit for donors who want to contribute to shifting norms around evidence in Christian spaces.

The Christian Case for Anti-Poverty Action

“If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion—how can God’s love be in that person?” (1 John 3:17)

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” (Matthew 25:40)

"God's Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth. Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God's people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals nor how orthodox are their creeds and confessions."  - Ron J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

The Christian case for fighting poverty is overwhelming. Nearly every page of the Bible displays God’s heart for the poor and his command that his followers pursue care, mercy, and justice for the poor and marginalized.

The Law of Moses instructs landowners to leave some of their grain for their poor or immigrant neighbors. The prophets insisted that God would not hear a nation’s prayer until the poor were taken care of. John the Baptist taught that a person with two shirts was obligated to give one to a neighbor who had none. Jesus commanded his followers to sell their possessions to give to the poor. This pattern continues through the book of Acts and the letters of James, Paul and John: care for the poor is one of the primary marks of a faithful Christian life, and the failure to do so is repeatedly condemned as a serious sin. 

Some resources providing a more in-depth look at the Bible’s teachings on poverty include:

• Gary Vanderpol’s Lazarus at the Gate bible study curriculum 

• Compassion International’s “What the Bible Says About Poverty”

• Gustavo Gutiérrez’s book A Theology of Liberation (and the rich, ongoing dialogue it inspired)

Aside: Am I rich?

There is a clear biblical call for the rich to devote significant time and resources to serving the poor. But who are “the rich”? Billionaires? Oil Tycoons? Movie stars?

If you live in a wealthy country, it’s likely that your sense of what makes a person rich has been skewed by the money around you. It is easy to forget, for example, that even middle-class Americans are wealthier than most of the people who have ever lived, including the men Jesus chides for their affluence in the gospels.

Giving What We Can’s  “How rich am I?” widget is an eye-opening way to see how high your income is on a global scale. You may find that you’re more blessed than you realized—and, in turn, are called to share that abundance with others.

The average starting salary for a US college graduate is estimated to be $55,000 per year, or $44,000 after tax. This puts one at the top 97.9% of global income.

Why an Evidence-Based Approach?

The history of international missions and charity is littered with well-meaning people who hurt the people they believed they were helping. 

• In 2005, a charity called PlayPump introduced a pump attached to a Merry-Go-Round, so that when children played on the playground, their movement would pump water their families could use to drink and cook. The project, celebrated by Western celebrities and dignitaries as the future of charity, was a failure: the pumps were expensive, regularly broken, and not particularly fun for children, leaving the work to adult women who found the Merry-Go-Round aspect demeaning. ¹⁹
• After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, the Red Cross raised nearly five hundred million dollars to help rebuild the country. In 2015, ProPublica ²⁰ and NPR ²¹ reported that the Red Cross had built only six (of an originally promised 700) homes with the money, amid reports of financial waste, inflated numbers, and failed projects. The Red Cross disputes ²² this coverage.
• Renee Bach, an American woman with no medical training, felt called by God to serve malnourished children in Uganda, where she’d spent time on a mission trip. Her organization, Serving His Children, raised money from American churches hoping to make a difference overseas. In 2015, the group’s health center was temporarily shut down by the Ugandan government for licensing problems and for attempting to treat very sick children without the training to do so, rather than referring them to real hospitals. ²³ In 2019 Bach was sued by two mothers whose children had died in her care, in a lawsuit that she settled in 2020 by paying each woman $9,500. ²⁴ The story is now the subject of The Missionary , a podcast by journalists Rajiv Golla, Halima Gikandi and Malcolm Burnley.

Nobody wants their donations to go to waste, so many Christians are starting to seek rigorous evidence of whether the charities they give to are actually improving people’s lives. Much of this evidence comes from the world of development economics, where researchers like Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer have spearheaded the use of experiments to see which ideas work—and which good ideas work best. ²⁵

Why is this kind of evidence important? Can’t we just use our intuition for what’s good? To see for yourself, try taking a quiz produced by 80,000 Hours, which lets you guess which of ten American social interventions helped, which ones hurt, and which ones did very little. Now imagine trying to make the same guesses about every anti-poverty program that’s ever existed!

Experimental approaches, while extraordinarily helpful, are not perfect: measuring the wrong factors (or misinterpreting the right factors) can create false confidence in a harmful program. ²⁶ The factors that made a program succeed in an experiment in one country might differ (or even point the other direction) in another region. So even for the most evidence-backed initiatives, it is important to have local voices involved with real decision-making power, and for donors and practitioners to approach new situations with humility and a willingness to learn and change.

Why is the fight against global poverty challenging?

There is no single explanation for poverty. Instead, a complicated web of factors all come together to keep people from flourishing, including:

• Lack of access to markets, education, and credit

• Authoritarian or otherwise oppressive government

• Gender, ethnic, and other kinds of discrimination

• Poor infrastructure and inadequate public goods

• Lasting effects of historical injustice (particularly colonialism and the slave trade)

• Physical ailments (including hunger) 

• Pollution and environmental damage

• Macroeconomic challenges

• Ongoing civil wars

• Insecure property rights 

The multifaceted nature of poverty means there is no “one-size fits all” solution: access to education will not, on its own, create better infrastructure, nor will feeding people help them work in a community where there are no jobs. Eliminating extreme poverty will require serious work on many different fronts at the same time, and many of these problems are extremely challenging: there is no simple recipe for stopping a civil war or sparking macroeconomic growth.

Our recommendations focus on the factors that are easiest for donors to influence: physical ailments and access to money and other goods. There are already organizations doing very good work, and they have the capacity to do even better work with more money. As more money flows to these “low-hanging fruits” and these funding gaps close, the most effective ways to fight poverty will shift to other margins. As such, we affirm that it is essential that organizations and researchers are focusing on these other factors, even while they aren’t our current top funding recommendations.

Five Judgment Calls

(1) Shouldn’t we be focused on systemic change?

Who, in the past century, would you guess has done the most to help the poor? Bill Gates? Mother Teresa? UNICEF?  While there’s no way to know for sure, a strong contender is Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whose market reforms revolutionized the country’s economy and brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. 

Many of the factors that keep people in poverty come from broken systems. When Deng Xiaoping came to power, China’s centrally planned economy was struggling to produce enough food for its population and the possibility of widespread economic growth was out of the question altogether. The problem wasn’t a lack of donations: the system itself was holding people back, and people could not flourish until it changed. While much of his tenure was marked by human rights abuses (including the Tiananmen Square Massacre), Deng’s economic reforms gave people the tools they needed to improve their own financial circumstances, and China’s economy boomed as a result. 

Shanghai’s skyline visually demonstrates the power of systemic change.

Systemic change holds the potential for both great benefits and great harm. There is a strong economic consensus that healthy institutions (e.g. free markets, rule of law, investment in infrastructure) play a key role in economic growth. But there is less consensus on which individual policies can achieve this, and few reforms are as successful as China’s. The effects of most individual market reforms continue to be debated by experts, and some (e.g. Russia’s version of the “shock therapy” efforts in the early 1990s) have even been blamed for economic collapses that devastated the poor. 

Because questions about individual policies are complex and country-specific, and the cost of getting them wrong is so high, we do not have a general recommendation on which changes Christians should pursue. We believe that economic growth, particularly in developing countries, is central to the fight against poverty, and we also recognize the challenges to sparking it. We therefore recommend that Christians who feel called to serve the global poor through policy invest a significant amount of time into becoming subject matter experts (e.g. by pursuing a graduate degree in economics or a related field) and use that expertise to search and push for policies that will serve the global poor. 

You can see our recommendations for Christians interested in pursuing policy changes here.

(2) Shouldn't we focus on transforming lives instead?

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. ²⁷

In the past twenty years, with the publication of books like When Helping Hurts and Toxic Charity, Christians have started to look more seriously at the long-term effects of different kinds of charity. What happens when good intentions aren’t enough? When we leave, what will happen to the people we served? Are we setting people up to pursue their own success, or are we trapping them in cycles of dependence?

These are important questions and ones that donors historically have not always given thought to. How should we incorporate it into our giving? Should we primarily focus on connecting people to jobs, or providing skills training, rather than simply giving material goods? This is a good impulse and there is truth in it, but a number of recent experiments complicate this picture significantly. A famous (but somewhat controversial) trial found that providing free deworming medication to help children stay in school still raises their income twenty years later. ²⁸ Another analysis found that job training programs in developing countries generally underperform programs that “just give people stuff”—even when it comes to helping people get jobs! ²⁹

Our recommendations take long-term impacts into account. Programs that save lives (e.g. malaria nets) have obvious long-term impacts, because a child kept from dying will benefit for the rest of their life. Others, such as GiveDirectly’s cash transfer program, have extremely clear measurable short-term effects and ambiguous-but-encouraging evidence of long-run effects. ³⁰ We hope that our donations transform lives, but there is strong reason to believe that a typical program seeking transformation helps the global poor significantly less than our recommended charities. So until there is enough evidence to distinguish the best transformative charities, we encourage donors to give to one of our recommended programs.

(3) Shouldn’t we be giving to Christian organizations?

We currently believe that the best way for Christians to fight poverty is to donate to our recommended organizations, which are primarily secular. We are not aware of any Christian organizations that have, for example, the demonstrated life-saving impact of the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) or the poverty-alleviating impact of GiveDirectly. Because the difference in impact between a typical charity and the best charities is substantial (as much as a hundred times the benefit for the same cost!), and we do not yet have strong enough evidence to identify the best Christian charities or confidently quantify their effect on poverty, our top recommendation is currently to donate to secular organizations with a very strong evidence base. 

Many Christians find themselves called to both serving the poor and preaching the gospel, and understandably want to donate to organizations that do both. While there is very preliminary evidence ³² that some gospel-related interventions might increase people’s incomes a bit in the short run, this boost is much smaller than the difference between the best charities and typical charities. As a result, you can likely help more people escape poverty and more people hear the gospel by splitting your charity budget between one of our recommended poverty-fighting charities and a group that effectively preaches Christ than by choosing a single nonprofit that combines both components.

In fact, Christians and other people of faith are represented at all levels of leadership in many of the secular organizations we recommend. The Against Malaria Foundation has partnered with Episcopal Relief and Development (the charitable wing of the Episcopal Church) to deliver mosquito nets, and Paul Niehaus (founder of GiveDirectly) is a devout Christian. As part of a united effort with people of all faiths (and no faiths) serving the global poor, these Christians are able to love their global neighbors in ways that would be challenging for explicitly faith-based organizations: for example, they can provide relief and care for people in regions where Christians are not trusted or faith-based groups are actively persecuted.

Some Christians are concerned about God receiving the glory for their donations. If you are in this position, we recommend donating through the Christian Campaign for Effective Charity, which raises money for GiveWell’s top-rated charities in a publicly Christian manner. At the time of writing, this campaign has raised more than $250,000 dollars in Jesus’s name for some of the world’s most effective charities. 

For further discussion on this topic, see this blog post by Alex Rattee!

(4) Should we help “our own” first?

Some people believe that the moral obligation to care for people close to you—family members, physical neighbors, citizens of the same country—is much stronger than for people separated by distance, language, or culture. Serving your local community lets you see the results of your work directly, and also creates social ties that are harder to build from far away. These are important benefits, and donations to the global poor can’t replace the church’s call to genuinely and fully love the people we come across. 

But the bible’s call to love has never been limited to “people like us”. When a religious leader asked Jesus to specify which neighbors he was meant to love, Jesus responded with one of his most famous parables: the story of a Samaritan (a foreigner and “heretic”!) who stopped to help a man after two of his compatriots left him alone to die.  To drive home the point, Jesus then asked the leader:

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

The question for Christians is not “Who is my neighbor?”

The question is instead “To whom can I be a neighbor today?” 

The answer will depend on the context. When it comes to spending time together, lending items you own, or opening your home in hospitality,  you may naturally find it easiest to be a neighbor to people in your community.

But when it comes to financial giving, you will likely find that the people you can best serve are far away from you, because money goes much further in developing countries than in rich ones. A blog post by Giving What We Can, a community of evidence-based donors, puts it concisely: ³³

“Most of the time however, if you live in a middle- or high-income country, you can maximise the impact of your dollar by sending it to a lower-income country. For $619, you can increase a household's income in the U.S. by about 1%. For $547, you can double the income of a household in Kenya. In fact, for each dollar spent, those who live in wealthy countries can expect to do at least one hundred times more good for those in low-income countries than they could for themselves.”

Because we do not believe that one’s obligation to (for example) people in the United States is a hundred times as strong as the world’s poorest people, we recommend that readers in wealthy countries direct most of their donations to the global poor. 

If you live in a poor or middle-income country, we recognize that this calculation will look a bit different! A few years ago, Thiago Tamosauskas gathered some initial thoughts on this in the Brazilian context, but we ultimately think this is a judgment call that will look different for different people.

(5) Is charity just “Modern-Day Imperialism”?

Many parts of the modern field of international aid and development grew out of colonial institutions, which were primarily designed to exploit local people for the benefit of wealthy Europeans. The power differentials created by these systems remain, with wealthy American and European donors and academics exercising an enormous influence on the policies and lives of people in the Global South.

There is a real tradeoff between the good money can do, and the unhealthy power dynamics it can create between donors and recipients. Nonprofits (including some we recommend) are becoming more aware of and attempting to address this problem, but serious imbalances remain and some argue that the harm of this kind of donation outweighs the good. Some discussions of this kind of systemic problem include:

• Omar Bah’s Mzungus in Development and Governments

• Edgar Villanueva’s book Decolonizing Wealth, and this interview about it.

• Bill Easterly’s book The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

• “The Charitable-Industrial Complex” by Peter Buffett

• The New Colonialists by Michael A. Cohen, Maria Figueroa Küpçü and Parag Khanna

We think this is an important critique, and we encourage researchers and practitioners to take it to heart.  We believe the good done by our recommended nonprofits currently outweighs these concerns, but concrete action to address them could substantially increase the effectiveness of the development nonprofit world as a whole.

Interested in talking to someone about tackling global poverty with your career?

Sign up for 1-on-1 mentorship. We’ll pair you with a Christian who can talk to you about how to make an impact in this problem area.

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Notes:

*After the first draft of this report was written, GiveWell's All Grants Fund granted 1.8 million dollars to the Development Innovation Lab, where I [Colin] do research. I, therefore, believe it would be a conflict of interest to select this fund as a "Top Pick" and have removed it from the list. This does not reflect any update on my personal beliefs about the fund, which remains the target of most of my own charitable giving.

1. Poor Economics, by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, summarizing work by Amartya Sen. ↩

2. Hasell, Joe; Roser, Max; Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban, Arriagada, Pablo. (2022) Poverty. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty ↩

3. Our World in Data (No date) Poverty: Share of population living on less than $10 a day, 2019. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-10-int--per-day?tab=table ↩

4. Ritchie, Hannah; Rosado, Pablo; and Roser, Max (2022) Hunger and Undernourishment. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment#too-little-height-for-age-stunting. Accessed 2023-12-22. ↩

5. World Health Organisation (2020 September 8) Children: improving survival and well-being. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-reducing-mortality ↩

6. C.S Lewis (1952) Mere Christianity, Book III, Chapter 3 “Social Morality” https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/merechristianitylewis.pdf ↩

7. Orthodoxwiki. (No date) Philanthropy. Referenced 2023-12-22. https://orthodoxwiki.org/Philanthropy Edwards, Ethan. (2022 October 8) History of Christian giving – part I. Christ and Counterfactuals. https://christandcounterfactuals.substack.com/p/history-of-christian-giving-part-i ResourceUMC (No date) John Wesley on giving. Adapted from addresses that Bishop Kenneth L. Carder (retired) delivered to the Giving and the Gospel Symposium in 1997 and the United Methodist Summit on Christian Stewardship in 2003. https://www.resourceumc.org/en/content/john-wesley-on-giving Torvend, Samuel. (2017, March 29). “Martin Luther’s Teaching and Practice of Charity and Social Ethics”. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. https://oxfordre.com/religion/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-366 Dégert, Antoine (1913). "St. Vincent de Paul". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15. Robert Appleton Company. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/St._Vincent_de_Paul --> https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/St._Vincent_de_Paul ↩

8. Wydick, Bruce. (2015 December 29) Five Poverty Busters You Should Know. Christianity Today. https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/december-web-only/five-poverty-busters-you-should-know.html Accessed 2023-12-22. ↩

9. Hasell, Joe; Roser, Max; Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban, and Arriagada, Pablo (2022) Poverty. Our World in Data. Accessed 2023-12-22. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty#key-insights-on-poverty ↩

10. Ritchie, Hannah; Rosado, Pablo; and Roser, Max (2022) Hunger and Undernourishment. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment#too-little-height-for-age-stunting Accessed 2023-12-22. ↩

11. World Health Organisation (2020 September 8) Children: improving survival and well-being.https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/children-reducing-mortality ↩

12. USAID (No date) Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 President's Budget Request for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/fact-sheets/fiscal-year-2023-presidents-budget-request-usaid ↩

13. Sedlmayr, Richard; Shah, Anuj; Sulaiman, Munshi (2020) “Cash-plus: Poverty impacts of alternative transfer-based approaches”. Journal of Development Economics, Volume 144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2019 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304387818305522) ↩

14. GiveWell (2021, Last update 2023 April) Evidence Action's Deworm the World Initiative – August 2022 version. https://www.givewell.org/charities/deworm-world-initiative/August-2022-version ↩

15. Piper, Kelsey (2022) The return of the “worm wars”. Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/19/23268786/deworming-givewell-effective-altruism-michael-hobbes ↩

16. Kaplan, Miranda (2022) A major update in our assessment of water quality interventions. GiveWell. https://blog.givewell.org/2022/04/06/water-quality-overview/ ↩

17. Bahl, Kanika (2019 June 06) We’re Shutting Down No Lean Season, Our Seasonal Migration Program: Here’s Why. Evidence Action. https://www.evidenceaction.org/newsroom/were-shutting-down-no-lean-season-our-seasonal-migration-program-heres ↩

18. Bryan, Gharad; Choi, James J; and Karlan, Dean (2020) "Randomizing Religion: the Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes". The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 136(1), 293–380. PDF available in the NBER working paper series here https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24278/w24278.pdf ↩

19. Stellar, Daniel (2010) The PlayPump: What Went Wrong? State of the Planet. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/ ↩

20. Elliott, Justin, and Sullivan, Laura (2015) How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti ­and Built Six Homes. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billion-dollars-for-haiti-and-built-6-homes ↩

21. Sullivan, Laura (2015) In Search Of The Red Cross' $500 Million In Haiti Relief. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2015/06/03/411524156/in-search-of-the-red-cross-500-million-in-haiti-relief ↩

22. Meltzer, David (2015) The Real Story of the 6 Homes in Haiti: Answering Your Questions. The American Red Cross. https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/news/The-Real-Story-of-the-6-Homes-Answering-Questions-about-Haiti.html ↩

23. Aizenman, Nurith, and Gharib, Malaka. (2019 August 9) American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/09/749005287/american-with-no-medical-training-ran-center-for-malnourished-ugandan-kids-105-d ↩

24. McCool, Alice (2020 July 28) US missionary accused over Uganda child deaths settles out of court. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/28/us-missionary-accused-over-uganda-child-deaths-settles-out-of-court-renee-bach ↩

25. Piper, Kelsey (2019 December 11) The Nobel went to economists who changed how we help the poor. But some critics oppose their big idea. Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/11/20938915/nobel-prize-economics-banerjee-duflo-kremer-rcts ↩

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27. Quote attributed to Lao Tzu. ↩

28. Piper, Kelsey (2020 August 6) A new study finds that giving kids deworming treatment still benefits them 20 years later. Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/8/6/21354847/kremer-miguel-worms-deworming ↩

29. Blattman, Christopher, and Ralston, Laura (2015) Generating Employment in Poor and Fragile States: Evidence from Labor Market and Entrepreneurship Programs. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2622220 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2622220 ↩

30. GiveWell (2012; Last updated: November 2018) Cash Transfers. https://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/cash-transfers ↩

31. Giving What We Can (No date) Comparing charities: How big is the difference? Accessed 2023-12-29. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charity-comparisons. Accessed 2023-12-29. ↩

32. Bryan, Gharad; Choi, James J; and Karlan, Dean (2020) "Randomizing Religion: the Impact of Protestant Evangelism on Economic Outcomes". The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 136(1), 293–380. PDF available in the NBER working paper series here https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24278/w24278.pdf ↩

33. Adleberg, Toni; Surani, Faiz; GWWC Team (2021) Charity begins at home; shouldn't we solve our own problems before helping others? Giving What We Can. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/charity-begins-at-home-shouldnt-we-solve-our-own-problems-before-helping ↩