Thousands of hours have gone into finding our top-rated charities. They're proven, cost-effective, underfunded, and outstanding.
Top international charities
Top United States charities
Top charities, by cause
Our charity evaluation process
For specifics, see
our process for international charities and
our process for U.S. charities.
GiveWell's process broadly consists of:
- Examine hundreds of charities and relevant academic literature
- Deeply investigate the most promising charities by our criteria
- Publish all the details of our charity recommendations and the full details of our reasoning on this website
Evaluation criteria
We look for charities that are proven, cost-effective, have "room for more funding," and are transparent. More information is available on our
criteria page.
Identifying charities
We cast the net as wide as we can to consider as many charities as possible, reviewing hundreds of charities' websites and more deeply investigating the most promising ones. We identify charities from sources, including:
- Submissions to our website
- Grantees of other major funders such as the Skoll, Gates, or Mulago foundations
- Partners of research organizations such as the Poverty Action Lab or Innovations for Poverty Action
In-depth charity reviews
We perform in-depth reviews of charities that meet our
heuristics for further evaluation. These are a relatively small subset of all the charities we consider and are those we believe have a reasonable chance of receiving our recommendation.
We begin our process by reviewing all publicly available information about a charity including its website, external evaluations, and other relevant information.
We then try and speak directly with a member of a charity's senior management, who can answer questions about the organization's overall activities and process for evaluating its impact.
We also often request additional documents and information which we analyze and incorporate into our review process.
