Communicating the best research and data to understand big global problems and make progress against them.

Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: The world faces many great and terrifying problems. Our World in Data focuses on communicating the best research and data that helps us understand and find solutions to the world’s largest problems.

Our World in Data publishes an open-access publication where users can understand the state of the world today, where we are making progress and where we are falling behind. Through interactive data visualizations we can see how the world has changed; by summarizing the scientific literature we can understand why. We cover everything from global poverty to natural disasters, education and health, democracy; we have over 3500 charts across 300 topics.

Our World in Data is free, open-source and provided as a public good. It has millions of users every month, and is cited in research and media across the world every day. This allows millions of people to understand the large problems the world is facing, and how we can solve them. 

Our World in Data

Delivering unconditional cash directly to the world's poorest households via secure mobile transfers. 

Since 2009, GiveDirectly has delivered more than $580 million in unconditional cash transfers to families in need. These one-time cash transfers allow recipients to invest in what they need most and have been shown to improve their earnings, children’s school attendance, health, nutrition, and mental well-being.
 
GiveDirectly uses government data to target villages where most or all residents are living in extreme poverty, defined by the World Bank as earning under $2.15/day. In-country GiveDirectly staff enroll one member of each household in the entire village to receive a one-time transfer of about $1,000 USD sent in two installments using mobile money. Recipients can then withdraw the mobile funds as cash with local agents and use the funds to invest in what they need – whether it’s on starting a business, education, making their home safer/sturdier, healthcare, or livestock.
 
GiveDirectly uses rigorous experimental research (randomized controlled trials) to measure the impact of their unconditional cash programs and answer public policy questions, generating evidence on key design and implementation questions across varied contexts. You can find over 300 studies on the positive impacts of cash transfers in GiveDirectly’s Cash Research Explorer.

GiveDirectly

Evidence Action scales evidence-based and cost-effective programs to reduce the burden of poverty. 

Our organization was founded in 2013 to address a big gap in the fight against global poverty--many of the most promising interventions are either implemented at a very small scale, or not at all. We set out to address this gap by building programs that would scale evidence-based and cost-effective interventions, leading to significant improvements in quality of life for hundreds of millions of people. 

Our model worked. In less than a decade, our two flagship programs, the Deworm the World Initiative and Dispensers for Safe Water, have grown to measurably impact over 280 million people each year. This success is achieved through the dedication and talent of our staff, the hard work of our partners, and the commitment of our supporters.

By 2024, we seek to double our impact. We are strengthening and expanding our existing programs, and working to identify a new generation of evidence-based and cost-effective interventions that we can scale to reach millions more. 

We currently operate three programs:

Dispensers for Safe Water 

Dispensers for Safe Water program delivers free and reliable access to safe water for 4 million people in rural Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi.
In rural parts of low-income countries, most water sources are untreated, meaning that water is not safe to drink directly from the source. Our uniquely-engineered chlorine dispensers are installed next to commonly-used water sources, enabling people to treat their water using a safe and pre-measured dose of chlorine. The chlorine stays active for 2-3 days, ensuring water doesn’t get recontaminated even when stored at home. Adding diluted chlorine to water is a WHO-endorsed approach to improving water quality. 
Dispensers for Safe Water is a cost-effective solution - just over $1.00 delivers safe water access to one person for an entire year. In 2019, our program averted over 380,000 cases of diarrhea among children, one of the main causes of childhood mortality in the countries where we operate.

Deworm the World Initiative

Deworm the World Initiative helps governments launch, scale, and sustain school-based deworming programs.

Over 868 million children globally are at risk of contracting parasitic worm infections. If left untreated, infections can lead to anemia, malnourishment, and impaired mental and physical development—ultimately affecting children’s educational outcomes and income as adults.Our program brings free treatment to children at their schools instead of placing the burden on the families to obtain it. We partner with governments to regularly treat all at-risk children in places where at least 20% are infected with worms, as recommended by the World Health Organization.  

Rigorous research shows that deworming leads to significant improvements to children’s health, education, and long-term wellbeing. In 2019, we helped governments treat over 280 million children in India, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Pakistan for less than US 50 cents per treatment.

Accelerator:  
 
Evidence Action Accelerator is our engine for new program development that selects, optimizes, and scales interventions with the highest potential to measurably improve the lives of millions of people in the world’s poorest places.  

Each intervention considered by the Accelerator must undergo a multi-stage process of program development, taking it from an evidence-based concept to a fully-developed solution that can be replicated in multiple geographies. We look for three critical aspects during the assessment process: rigorous evidence, cost-effectiveness, and potential for scale. 

We are currently accelerating two promising health solutions: working with the Liberian government to detect and treat maternal syphilis, with the aim of preventing thousands of child deaths and disabilities each year; and supporting the Indian government to improve the distribution of iron and folic acid supplementation to millions of children and adolescents —treating iron deficiency anemia, one of the main causes of disability in the country.





Evidence Action

We are a think tank dedicated to figuring out the best ways to make the world a better place.

Rethink Priorities is a research organization that conducts critical research to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future.

Our research spans everything from animal welfare to the threat of nuclear war. We explore neglected but promising areas to improve the world and try to further build the community of researchers working on understanding how to do this most effectively.

If you'd like to support one of our fiscally sponsored projects (e.g. Epoch), you can give via Every.org, and let us know how to allocate your gift at info@rethinkpriorities.org.

Rethink Priorities

We do foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a research nonprofit studying the mathematical underpinnings of intelligent behavior. Our mission is to develop formal tools for the clean design and analysis of general-purpose AI systems, with the intent of making such systems safer and more reliable when they are developed.

The field of AI has a reputation for overselling its progress. In the “AI winters” of the late 1970s and 1980s, researchers’ failures to make good on ambitious promises led to a collapse of funding and interest in AI. Although the field is now undergoing a renaissance, overconfidence is still a major fear; discussion of the possibility of human-equivalent general intelligence is still largely relegated to the science fiction shelf.

At the same time, researchers largely agree that AI is likely to begin outperforming humans on most cognitive tasks in this century. Given how disruptive domain-general AI could be, we think it is prudent to begin a conversation about this now, and to investigate whether there are limited areas in which we can predict and shape this technology’s societal impact.

Researchers at MIRI tend to be relatively agnostic about how the state of the art in AI will change over the coming decades, and how many years off smarter-than human AI systems are. 

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Academic research centre at UC Berkeley that carries out technical & advocacy work to help ensure the safety of AI systems

https://give.berkeley.edu/fund/FN3330000

CHAI’s research spans computer science, psychology, economics and other areas, and CHAI faculty and Principal Investigators include academics at various world-leading American universities. CHAI is one of the few academic research centres that is focused solely on the safety of advanced AI. They work on developing the fundamentals of safe AI which is beneficial to humans and understanding the complexities of the potential risks. 

The Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI)

The Centre for Effective Altruism helps to grow and support the effective altruism community.

Effective altruism is about using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.

The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) is a charity dedicated to building and nurturing a global community of people who are thinking carefully about the world’s biggest problems and taking impactful action to solve them.

We hope that this community can help to build a radically better world: by connecting students and young professionals with relevant experts, we can help them consider their values and find an effective way to contribute that is a good fit for their skills and inclinations.

Centre for Effective Altruism USA

StrongMinds provides life-changing mental health services to women in Africa using innovative community-based group therapy.

According to the WHO, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease. In Africa, an estimated 66M women have depression and 85% have no access to treatment. Since 2014, StrongMinds has treated over 200,000 individuals for depression symptoms, with 80% measuring as depression-free after therapy. When a woman recovers from depression, she is more engaged in the community and her economic activity increases. Her family eats more meals and her children go to school more often. When you invest in mental health, you invest in the future of an individual, their family, and their community.

StrongMinds Inc

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I'm a member of Given What We Can and pledged to donate a portion of my income to effective charities • Community Director of EA Anywhere

I'd like the long-term potential of humanity to be preserved

I want to help a person or a family to get out of extreme poverty

The long-term potential of humanity is unimaginably enormous. I can’t even dream of the number of stars our distant descendants will settle on and how diverse their forms, abilities, and feelings will be.

Scientists researching existential risks estimate the chance of that long-term potential being destroyed by AI as 1/10 within the next 100 years. For comparison, they estimate the probability of an existential catastrophe caused by a naturally-originated pandemic as 1/10000; by a climate change as 1/1000 per century.

AI researchers don’t know how to make an artificial general intelligence such that it won’t destroy humanity; they think the default way the AI will be created would lead to a catastrophe.
No one has come up with a way to solve the problem of aligning preferences of a teachable agent switch human preferences. It is well understood that it’s impossible to achieve just by defining some rules or designing an accurate utility function (just like it’s impossible to come up with a wish a genie would have to fulfill in a way you intended to (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ARaTpNX62uaL86j6/the-hidden-complexity-of-wishes)). The researchers have shown that any statically defined utility function won’t be aligned with human preferences. No one has come up with an algorithm that would create agents doing what we’d want them to do if we were smarter.
Among the ways that can potentially work, there are, e.g., algorithms that create agents that want to satisfy our preferences but aren’t sure what those preferences are, and thus every time they aren’t sure what we would want them to do, they ask. How to create such algorithms, scientists and researchers don’t know yet.
Experts in this field estimate the chances of an existential catastrophe caused by AI a lot higher than 1/10.

The creation of the first AGI will be the event that will determine the history of humanity. The long-term potential of our species can be destroyed - but if we succeed, we’ll get an assistant that will help us solve all of the other problems humanity is facing.  

The estimates of when AGI will be created vary among researchers. But if humanity knew that aliens would arrive on Earth in a few decades, it would already begin to prepare. The creation of AGI is an event far more important than an encounter of another intelligent species - and we almost certainly know that we have less than a century remaining. I believe that AI Existential Safety is the most important thing people can work on right now.

Machine Intelligence Research Institute is one of the organizations that work on reducing the AI-related existential risk. They do research to ensure that smarter-than-human AI will have a positive impact.

You can read more on Artificial General Intelligence in “Human Compatible”, a book by Stuart Russel. He is a professor at UC Berkeley and author of the most popular textbook on machine learning used by 1500 universities around the world.
You can read more on existential threats to humanity in “The Precipice”, a book by Toby Ord. He is a researcher at the Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute and the founder of Giving What We Can.

The return on growing the EA movement is huge. Many EA causes are talent constrained and I think CEA can help bring more people into the fold to eventually meet those needs.