This post summarizes research that Rethink conducted in 2022 for into scientific capacity in sub-Saharan Africa. The main aim of this project was to understand whether it could be a high-impact grantmaking area for Open Philanthropy.

This research updated GiveWell’s previous literature review on the long-term income effects of childhood malaria to determine whether the assumption that income in adulthood decreases by 1% per childhood malaria case should be adjusted and whether any further evidence should be considered.

This report is a broad overview of larval source management, including evidence for effectiveness, room for more funding, and coverage by existing implementers.

This summary aims to understand whether and how the “double treatment” parameter in GiveWell’s model on vitamin A supplementation should be updated, and to produce estimates for additional countries of interest.

Universal introduction of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries has lagged behind introductions in high-income countries. While Gavi—a global public-private partnership—has helped to alleviate cost-related delays, additional bottlenecks remain. This report suggests interventions to further improve efficiency and experiences throughout the vaccine delivery process.

This report is a “shallow” investigation commissioned by Open Philanthropy. This primary focus of the report is to assess weather forecasting as a potential agricultural intervention in low- and lower-middle income countries and to examine the cost-effectiveness of different interventions.

Researcher Ruby Dickson and Senior Environmental Economist Greer Gosnell investigated various interventions that may help very poor people to increase their income and earning potential in the short and medium term. Their goal in this report is to provide a foundational overview of the potential for particular income-improving livelihood interventions with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

This report is a “shallow” investigation and was commissioned by Open Philanthropy and produced by Rethink Priorities. Open Philanthropy does not necessarily endorse our conclusions. The primary focus of the report is a literature review of the effectiveness of prizes in spurring innovation and what design features of prizes are most effective in doing so. We also spoke to one expert. We hope this report galvanizes a productive conversation about the effectiveness of prizes within the effective altruism community. We are open to revising our views as more information is uncovered.

Agricultural land redistribution is a type of agrarian reform in which large farms are broken up and distributed to tenants or landless peasants. Land redistribution typically requires exceptional circumstances to succeed. Past redistributive efforts have been most successful in the aftermath of revolution, war, or independence. When redistribution has succeeded, it has been accompanied by extensive agricultural support, such as rural infrastructure development, subsidies for fertilizers and high-yield seeds, agronomic training, and cheap credit. The main value of redistribution appears to be improved agricultural yields, but redistribution is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for improved yields.

The value of charter cities can be divided into three main buckets: (1) direct benefits from providing an engine of growth that increase the incomes and wellbeing of people living in and around the city, (2) domestic indirect benefits from scaling up successful charter city policies across the host country, and (3) global indirect benefits from providing a laboratory to experiment with new policies, regulations, and governance structures. We think it is unlikely that charter cities will be more cost-effective than GiveWell top charities in terms of directly improving wellbeing.

Lead exposure is a large problem with social costs on the order of $5-10 trillion annually, most of which come through neurological damages and losses in IQ causing lost income later in life. Lead exposure is diverse both in terms of sources and geography, with there being many different pathways for environmental lead to enter the human body and exposure being common across nearly all low- and middle-income countries. Although the proportion of the lead burden attributable to different sources is unclear, important exposure pathways include informal recycling of lead acid batteries, residential use of lead-based paint, consumption of lead-adulterated foodstuffs, and cookware manufactured with scrap lead. Rough initial cost-effectiveness estimates suggest that some strategies for dealing with lead exposure could be as or more cost-effective than GiveWell top charities.