The phases of our research process:

 

EXISTING CHARITY EVALUATIONS

We looked into various existing charity evaluations oriented towards effective giving or informed giving. 

We tried to learn as much about their evaluation processes to figure out what we should focus on looking for. 

To develop our research process and evaluation framework, we referred to the work done by international organisations such as GiveWell, The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), The Life You Can Save and local organisations such as Just Cause. 

CAUSE PRIORITISATION

Our scope is charities in Southeast Asia, serving in low- and low-middle income countries. 

We looked into the health data of populations in Southeast Asia and found two cause areas — malnutrition & WASH — are particularly promising in being cost-effective and high impact to target resources in global health & development for the poor.

We think that these programmes are addressing the pressing needs in Southeast Asia because of the the number (i.e. scale) of people affected.

These are also areas that charitable interventions exist for donors to directly give to. 

FINDING THE CHARITIES

To start, we had to look through the web for public data of the charities in Southeast Asia. We got huge pro-bono support from DataKind Singapore (DK SG) for this web-scraping process. 

DK SG's volunteers helped to do an extensive web-based search and narrowed down potential charities that work in malnutrition & WASH.

We then looked at the programmes that these charities worked on and narrowed down the list that targets the (i) maternal & child malnutrition and (ii) WASH intervention programmes that we are focusing on. 

EVALUATION OF CHARITIES'
WORK

We are now in the midst of reaching out to the charities that we've found. 

We want to survey/interview/communicate these charities directly.

Our purpose is to understand about their work/programmes and hope that we'll be able to learn more about: 

  • what they do (programmes), 

  • how they do it (design & implementation) , and

  • finding out how confident we are that the programmes work well (i.e. evidence of effectiveness). 

Results

We endeavour to identify effective charities in this region and share with the public, specifically the giving community in Singapore. 

In August 2018, we'll be publishing what we've found.