LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Private philanthropy can only fill so much of the hole left after the Trump administration dismantled USAID. Mary Childs from our Planet Money podcast followed one organization making sure that every one of its dollars is spent as effectively as possible.
MARY CHILDS, BYLINE: GiveWell donates hundreds of millions of dollars every year with the very quantitative goal of saving or improving the most lives per dollar. Their normal process is slow, rigorous research with robust data. So stepping into this sudden USAID void was necessarily going to be uncomfortable. So last year, I asked if I could ride along with their decision making. They agreed. I should note that GiveWell's a financial supporter of NPR. So here is how just one funding decision played out about a grant to a medical charity in Cameroon. It starts in a Zoom last April, where researcher Rosie Bettle and Teryn Mattox, GiveWell's head of research, are looking at a spreadsheet.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
TERYN MATTOX: So I'm just looking at this Row 15.
CHILDS: Bettle and Maddox are trying to model how effective this grant is. And they've paused at one particular stat that seems implausibly high. It's how many kids die per 10,000 people per year.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
MATTOX: Seven hundred thirty total deaths per year, and then if we're averting 650...
CHILDS: They want to make sure they're understanding it right. And is that 730 figure with or without this medical group's work? Because that would mean without it...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ROSIE BETTLE: Is that potentially, like, a little bit higher still, which would seem like really gutting, right?
MATTOX: OK. So is this on the list for us to just ask them about tomorrow?
BETTLE: I think it's not, and actually, I think it should be.
CHILDS: The next day, GiveWell has a Zoom with a group in Cameroon. First, they want to get a handle on how dire the situation is right now. GiveWell asks if the health centers this group staffs are still operational.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
JOEL KAMBALE KAMETE: No. They are not running in 100%.
CHILDS: Joel Kambale Kamete says they'd already pulled doctors and nurses in an area called Makerere, where the grant funded work in 14 health centers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
KAMETE: Now, we have only four health centers and one hospital. So it's made from 14 to four.
CHILDS: So over the next month, GiveWell collects data and builds their models and convenes more Zooms, and they get stuck on two things. One, the data they can get is so far from complete. This is a conflict zone. The population is refugees and displaced people who don't always return for checkups.
Two, normally, they'd send in independent researchers to verify statistics and so on. They can't here. So one GiveWell researcher manages to find a director at one of the hospitals staffed by this Cameroon project.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
UNIDENTIFIED DIRECTOR: (Speaking French).
ALICE REDFERN: (Speaking French).
CHILDS: He was surprisingly blunt. If this group leaves...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
UNIDENTIFIED DIRECTOR: (Speaking French).
CHILDS: ...A catastrophe. Because, he said, the Cameroon project is key to so much of what the hospital does, and there's no real alternative. So the hospital director has convinced GiveWell that those numbers of lives saved, the ones that seemed implausibly high, they're probably pretty close to reality.
On June 3, GiveWell approved the grant for $1.9 million for this group's work in the far north of Cameroon, to fill in the entire hole left by USAID for one year. But this case is the exception. So far, GiveWell has been able to give about $50 million to fill the USAID hole of tens of billions.
Mary Childs, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
