We work hand-in-hand with rural communities to tackle seasonal hunger and malnutrition.

What we do: 

We deliver post-harvest credit and storage to help smallholder farmers sell later, earn more, and avoid hunger. 

In rural communities with a single rain-fed farming season, families experience variable food security. They are food secure right after the harvest, when food is cheap and plentiful. But as crop supplies dwindle due to premature sale and prices rise commensurately by an average of 66%, families struggle to put food on the table. These months are popularly known as the “lean season,” due to widespread food insecurity. 

Post-harvest credit and storage can help farmers sell later in the year, earn significantly more, and avoid seasonal hunger. Farmers use our cash loan to pay for critical post-harvest expenses like health emergencies, enabling them to avoid selling their crops immediately. They use the improved storage bags we provide, designed by crop scientists at Purdue University, to safely store without fear of crop loss to pests and rodents. As a result, farmers are able to take what is ordinarily a source of vulnerability and turn it into an economic opportunity to earn more from their crops. 

In the last three years, we have delivered over $200,000 in post-harvest credit and storage bags, reaching nearly 8,000 individuals. In our first year, we ran a small-scale impact evaluation which found that, seven months after the harvest, farmers who received our loan held onto 57% more of their harvest than those who did not. 

Our approach: 

Experimental approaches to development economics, pioneered by Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, have changed the game. We now know two critical facts. First, most social programs fail to produce any impact at all. Second, among the programs which succeed in making an impact, the best outperforms the median by an order of magnitude. Every decision our organization make is grounded in those facts. We start with an outcome we care about; improving food security, for example. We look at the evidence on what works to improve food security. Then, among the well-evidenced programs, we compare per dollar impact with the aim of finding the 99th percentile program. 

That process drove us towards post-harvest credit and storage. Two randomized control trials in Kenya and Tanzania found that post-harvest loans generated a 29% to 40% return on investment to farmers. Given our cost of implementation, our best estimate is that is that post-harvest loans are ~ 2x as effective as an unconditional cash transfer at raising people’s incomes when they need it most: that is, when they would otherwise struggle with hunger. 

Moving forward, we retain a fundamental open-mindedness with respect to what we do. If we find out that there are more cost-effective interventions which our organization is well-positioned to implement, we’re open to shifting course. However, we would not frame it that way. For us, the course would remain constant: to improve people’s lives as much as we can with each dollar we spend.  

Our Plans: 

In 2021, with support from Founders Pledge and USAID, we’re delivering over $112,000 in post-harvest credit and storage to 1,000 families. We’ll work with a Berkeley-Stanford team of economists led by Ethan Ligon to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of our program this year, so in Q3 2022 we’ll have the most robust estimate of our impact we’ve ever had. If post-harvest loans turn out to be as or more cost-effective than we expect, we will scale them to deliver 24,000 post-harvest loans by 2024, reaching 168,000 individuals. Alternatively, if it turns out that post-harvest loans are less cost-effective than the available alternatives, we’ll shut the program down and look to alternate options.



Taimaka Project

Improving the lives of egg-laying hens through feed fortification. 

Healthier Hens is a new Effective Altruism aligned animal welfare organization. Our vision is to cost-effectively improve the well-being of millions of farmed egg-laying hens. We are investigating the potential of an intervention focused on alleviating pain and improving hen health and welfare by optimizing the nutritional quality of layer hen feed, as recommended by the Charity Entrepreneurship research team. Our end goal is to lobby for legislation that sets minimum standards for nutrients in poultry feed and help enforce those standards nationwide.

While impactful, the egg industry’s ongoing positive transition to cage-free systems does not address the deeply neglected issue of poor bone health in layer hens, a major welfare problem prevalent across all housing systems on commercial farms. More than half of all hens experience at least one unnoticed and untreated fracture in their lifespan, which equals tons of neglected pain. We choose to act now and in doing so seek to achieve unprecedented counterfactual impact and healthier hens!

One of the first steps we must take is to properly analyze the nutrient levels in commercial and farmer-made feed, as well as assess bone deviations and fractures. For $200 we can test one feed sample and for $100 we can assess the bone health of 30 hens through palpation. And in preparation for our pilot, $1800 would allow us to provide optimal feed to 500 hens.

Healthier Hens is a project of Charity Entrepreneurship operating through a fiscal sponsorship with Players Philanthropy Fund (Federal Tax ID: 27-6601178), a Maryland charitable trust with federal tax-exempt status as a public charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to Healthier Hens are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

Healthier Hens

Maximising animal asks through dedicated research. 

Animal Ask has been founded with the express aim to optimise and prioritise farmed animal welfare asks. We conduct in-depth research, narrowly targeted at key decisions between different animal asks, supporting animal charities, donors, policymakers, and governments so that they may do more good in the long term.

Animal Ask is a project of Charity Entrepreneurship operating through a fiscal sponsorship with Players Philanthropy Fund (Federal Tax ID: 27-6601178), a Maryland charitable trust with federal tax-exempt status as a public charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to Animal Ask are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

Animal Ask

We enable working professionals to maximize their positive impact by supporting them in donating their various resources.

We empower working professionals to have the biggest positive impact possible. We are building a community of professionals working together for the greater good, contributing not only through their money but also with their time and skills according to the principles of effective altruism.

High Impact Professionals is a project of Charity Entrepreneurship operating through a fiscal sponsorship with Players Philanthropy Fund (Federal Tax ID: 27-6601178), a Maryland charitable trust with federal tax-exempt status as a public charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to High Impact Professionals are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

High Impact Professionals

LEEP advocates to prevent lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing, and potential of children worldwide. 

LEEP advocates for regulation on lead paint to reduce lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing, and potential of children worldwide. Lead poisoning is a colossal issue causing disability in 815 million children worldwide.

Currently, we are working on programs in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Pakistan, and are looking to expand to another 7 countries in the next year.

To learn more about our work, check out:
https://leadelimination.org/projects/
https://leadelimination.org/faqs/
https://leadelimination.org/blog/

Thank you for helping us to address the problem of lead poisoning, and improve the health of children worldwide.

Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP)

Charity Entrepreneurship is an effective altruist organization that helps start high-impact charities based on extensive research.

Our mission is to cause more effective charities to exist in the world by connecting talented individuals with high-impact intervention opportunities. We achieve this through an extensive research process and our Incubation Program. Our focus areas include animal advocacy, health and development policy, mental health and happiness, and family planning.

CE supports its incubated charities through a fiscal sponsorship with Players Philanthropy Fund (Federal Tax ID: 27-6601178), a Maryland charitable trust with federal tax-exempt status as a public charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions to CE are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. 

Charity Entrepreneurship

Support these four nonprofits in their endeavour to address the challenges of global poverty. 

Ending Global Poverty

Love animals? These charities are devoted to ending animal abuse and making life better for animals everywhere.

Animal Welfare

Solving some of the world's biggest challenges with cutting edge research and policy. 

Science and Tech Future

CEEALAR helps to alleviate bottlenecks to desk work in the effective altruist community via provision of free room & board.

CEEALAR advances education, learning and research through the provision of free/subsidised living accommodation, helping to alleviating bottlenecks to desk work in the effective altruist community. For more, see ceealar.org.

CEEALAR is a England and Wales nonprofit corporation operating through a fiscal sponsorship with Players Philanthropy Fund, a Maryland charitable trust recognized by IRS as a tax-exempt public charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (Federal Tax ID: 27-6601178). Contributions to CEEALAR are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

CEEALAR

My "Donations" tab has 60+ orgs that the effective altruism community supports. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZhDbbTQs5EAdCGzxt/