Episode
Deepening GiveWell’s Focus on Livelihoods Programs
- Podcast
- GiveWell Conversations
- Published
- Jul 10, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 1876
- Processing state
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- https://share.transistor.fm/s/2e831102
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Summary
GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question? In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about why GiveWell is dedicating more capacity to researching livelihoods programs that aim to increase people's incomes. They discuss how we're building on existing work, searching for new cost-effective opportunities, and exploring more of the impactful programs we've long cared about. Elie and Julie discuss: A new funding threshold: GiveWell uses a framework of “ moral weights ” to compare different outcomes across interventions, but they are a necessary tool and not an absolute truth. To account for this, we’re using a different cost-effectiveness threshold for our expanded livelihoods portfolio. This enables us to evaluate and fund programs that would appear as cost-effective as our standard recommendations to a donor who values income gains twice as much as our standard model. How we’re expanding our livelihoods work: GiveWell is hiring a dedicated Livelihoods Program Officer to lead a more focused search for impactful livelihoods programs. This increased capacity will allow us to develop a long-term livelihoods strategy, build an expert network, and collaborate directly with implementing organizations to find and co-create promising programs. Some areas we plan to explore more deeply: Promising areas for investigation include programs that create positive economic “spillover”…