Each year Charity Entrepreneurship identifies highly effective interventions in chosen cause areas. Our Incubation Program gives participants the skills they need to start high-impact nonprofits based on our top intervention recommendations. 

Our 2020 research period focused on four cause areas: mental health, animal advocacy, family planning, and health & development policy. We began with several hundred ideas in each cause area. Progressive stages of our extensive research process whittled down to eight recommended ideas. 

Eighty-hour reports linked below illustrate how we came to recommend this year’s top interventions. We also provide Incubation Program participants with implementation reports, which provide specific recommendations to map a path forward for a new charity.

2020 TOP CHARITY IDEAS

MENTAL HEALTH and Happiness

Mental health directly influences happiness and can fill large gaps in both high- and low-income countries. The evidence base also looks promising despite limited historical work on prioritization.
Check top ideas we researched in 2020.
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2020 top recommended idea: 

​Distributing workbooks to enable individuals to work independently on their mental health, supported by short weekly calls from lay health workers. 
​Distributing self-help workbooks enables individuals to make progress on their mental health either independently (known as pure self-help) or with minimal support (guided self-help). Our research found strong evidence that guided self-help in particular can significantly improve symptoms of anxiety, depression, and chronic pain – conditions that collectively affect over 2 billion people worldwide.

​ANIMAL WELFARE

Farmed and wild animals are victims of huge suffering and extreme neglect. There appear to be many promising ways to massively improve their lives. Now seems like a uniquely good time to found new animal organizations. Check top ideas we researched in 2020.
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2020 TOP RECOMMENDED IDEAS: ​

Improving the welfare of farmed shrimp, e.g. through collaborating with Vietnamese farmers to better oxygenate the water, thus reducing chronic suffering for shrimp.
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Fortifying feed with micronutrients to combat deficiencies and improve the health of laying hens.

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Helping organizations and policy-makers decide what best to ask of the animal agriculture industry. (We explored this intervention in 2019 and passed it on to 2020, as despite its promise it was not started.)

HEALTH and
​Development POLICY

Leveraging government resources through technical assistance and advocacy can make an impact at a very large scale. Health policies can be both evidence based and extremely cost effective. Check top ideas we researched in 2020.

​2020 TOP RECOMMENDED IDEAS: ​

Advocating for tighter regulation of lead paint to reduce the burden of lead exposure on human health and economic prosperity.
Advocating for increased alcohol taxation to mitigate the harmful effects of consumption.
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​Family Planning ​

Family planning has a range of positive effects on health, wealth, empowerment and more. The area looks highly promising and is growing dramatically but has not yet applied the same methodologies as other areas of global health. Check top ideas we researched in 2020.

2020 TOP RECOMMENDED IDEAS: ​

Broadcasting information about family planning to reduce misconceptions and empower women to make decisions about their fertility.
Providing family planning guidance to women at pivotal moments for their health and fertility, such as after giving birth.

CHARITIES STARTED - 2019

HAPPIER LIVES INSTITUTE

Researching the most effective methods for improving global well-being.
​Website: happierlivesinstitute.org
Contact: hello@happierlivesinstitute.org
Room for more funding: $100K until August 2020
Donate here ->

FISH WELFARE INITIATIVE

Reducing the suffering of billions of fish through targeted, scalable interventions.
​Website: fishwelfareinitiative.org
Contact: haven@fishwelfareinitiative.org

​SUVITA

Harnessing the power of community-led nudges to combat vaccine-preventable diseases
Website: suvita.org
Contact: contact@suvita.org
Room for more funding: $210k to the end of 2020
Donate here -> 

Good Policies


​Shaping health policy for impact at scale. Looking to improve tobacco control in neglected countries. 
Website: goodpolicies.org
Contact: hello@goodpolicies.org


​ANIMAL ADVOCACY CAREERS

Researching career trajectories and addressing talent constraints in the animal movement.
Website: animaladvocacycareers.org 
Contact: lauren@animaladvocacycareers.org

POLICY ENTREPRENEURSHIP NETWORK

Microexperiments in the space of health policy in low and middle-income countries.
​Website: policyentrepreneurs.org
Contact: contact@policyentrepreneurs.org
Room for more funding: $100k to the end of 2020
Donate here ->
You can now support these charities with a recurring donation through
​Charity Entrepreneurship.

WATCH OUR VIDEO ON WHY YOU SHOULD SUPPORT
​CE-INCUBATED CHARITIES

GIVEWELL INCUBATED CHARITIES
​STARTED BEFORE 2019

Before the first round of the Incubation Program in 2019, we did a less formal research program that resulted in founding two GiveWell-incubated, high-impact charities that otherwise would not have been founded.

FORTIFY HEALTH

Fortify Health aims to improve hundreds of thousands of lives by tackling anaemia and neural tube defects in India. They are working on open market wheat flour fortification and building strong partnerships to reach their 2020 goal of 12 mills in total across the two states, with the projected outcome of 214.8 metric tonnes of fortified flour being produced per day across the 12 mills. It has received two GiveWell Incubation Grants, including $1,000,000 in 2019 that provided the organisation with two years of funding for operations in Maharashtra and West Bengal.
Website: fortifyhealth.global
Contact: fortifyhealth.global/contact

Charity Science Health

Charity Science Health, another GiveWell-incubated organization, sends SMS reminders to mothers in India to help them remember when it is time to get their children vaccinated. Mobile vaccination reminders increase vaccination rates by 7 percentage points on average, and they cost only a few cents. CSH has reached over 250,000 families across India with these life-saving reminders, and we’ve now forged a clear path to scale through the public health system alongside a wide network of NGO partners.
Website: charitysciencehealth.com
Contact: health@charityscience.com
Donate: charitysciencehealth.com/donate.html