The Top Charities Fund supports the highest-priority funding needs among our top charities.

We find and recommend outstanding giving opportunities and publish our research to help donors give more effectively and with greater confidence.

All donations here support our Top Charities Fund. Donations to the Top Charities Fund are granted on a rolling basis to support cost-effective funding opportunities at our top charities. We use our latest research to grant the funds to the top charity (or charities) where we believe they’ll do the most good.

Learn more and view past grants at https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund


Photo caption: At health centers in Sierra Leone supported by Helen Keller Intl, mothers who bring their children in for twice-yearly vitamin A supplemention can also receive comprehensive counseling about birth control options that are available to them free of charge. Combining family planning and children's healthcare services benefits both mother and child. 2019.

Top Charities Fund

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

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

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

GEtbxbwooXQnIe2md2dfkO0cqTQuegbAt74YHjHuS7Y=

K42v2rPnyXTvEMlOPwVL8Cac/MSSUeXlt4aqkWPQoso=

L2J7ERPDqXyDj3E+RnwVUpRI4sraISk/0HbPwNe3PCc=

ipacWjgvkUpq55wyZUwsN4Qjjl7hLlH+eEjYOaQHYFw=

HMbe47+AneGCvW/Xo3JKBD0CoNn+J5g7nYakke86o7I=

Xzooxu7EFYOfep+MPJko33CDGhIpi48EHFdc8PC0QKQ=

I like the philosophy behind Effective Altruism: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Life has been kind to me and it's my mission to share that kindness with the world. 

Our World in Data provides an instrumental service, which became once more apparant during the Covid outbreak. Much like Wikipedia, it provides a crucial public good: in this case, high-quality data.

There are so many important causes. To me, investing in evidence based solutions to both combat and prevent disasters is one of the smartest things we can do for humanity. That's why I've become a monthly donor to Our World in Data!

That we don't know how to align AI is the biggest problem the world is facing and MIRI basically invented trying to solve that problem.