EA - Charity Entrepreneurship’s research into large-scale global health interventions by CE

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Charity Entrepreneurship’s research into large-scale global health interventions, published by CE on May 16, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DR: Description of our comprehensive research process, used to determine the most effective charity ideas within the large-scale global health cause area- our focus for the most recent research round. Starting with 300+ ideas, we used our iterative process to find four highly-scalable, cost-effective interventions to be launched from our Incubation Program.Every year at Charity Entrepreneurship, we try to find the best interventions to launch impact-focused charities through our Incubation Program. As a research-driven organization, we try to continuously improve our research methodology and process to ensure a robust and comprehensive analysis of the interventions under consideration. In our last research round (late 2022- early 2023), we focused on the area of large-scale global health. In this post we share with you our insights on the objectives, research framework, and selection criteria that have guided us in identifying and recommending the most impactful ideas in this space.Why “large-scale” global health?There is evidence to suggest that the larger a charity scales, the less cost-effective it becomes. This tradeoff likely applies to most cause areas, but it is most evident in the global health and development space.In this diagram from an Open Philanthropy talk, we can clearly see this correlation mapped out:Source: Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritization Framework Talk (min. 22:12)The diagram shows GiveWell's top-recommended charities from 2020 clustered on the 10x cash line, each having the ability to spend approximately $100 million or more, annually. GiveDirectly is located on the 1x cash point, having the capacity to spend approximately $100 billion annually.This has lead us to two considerations::Firstly, it suggests that those who prioritize evidence-based, impact-driven philanthropy may identify highly effective, yet challenging-to-scale interventions that surpass the efficacy of GiveWell's top recommendations. However, identifying such interventions may be challenging.Secondly, it means that Charity Entrepreneurship needs to determine how to balance cost-effectiveness and scalability when recommending potential high-impact interventions.During our 2020 and 2021 research round in the global health and development space, our primary focus was on maximizing cost-effectiveness. We honed in on policy charities in particular, which are likely to reside in the top left quadrant of the scalability versus cost-effectiveness graph; such organizations may be many times more effective than current top recommendations by GiveWell, but have limited capacity to absorb additional funds. For instance, HLI estimates here that LEEP, the longest-running policy charity incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship, is approximately 100 times more cost-effective than cash transfers.In 2022, we made the strategic decision to shift our focus from maximizing cost-effectiveness, to maximizing scalability.This decision was made given the apparent high level of funding available from organizations such as GiveWell.We challenged ourselves to seek out the most promising new charity ideas that could scale to absorb $5 million or more in funding within five years, while also maintaining the same level of cost-effectiveness as current top GiveWell recommendations (10x cash, ~$100/DALY).Our research processIn late 2022 and early 2023, we conducted a six-month research round with a team of four staff members, as well as several research fellows, to identify the most promising new charity ideas.Our approach prioritized ideas that met the following criteria, in order of importance:Surpassed our benchmark of 10x cash, and could sc...