Charity Entrepreneurship
Charity Research & Incubation
Charity Entrepreneurship is a research and training programme that incubates multiple effective charities annually.
What problem is Charity Entrepreneurship working on?
Only a small number of nonprofits are founded based on rigorous evidence and research. As a result, many problems go unidentified and unaddressed, and many talented individuals lack high-impact career opportunities.
What does Charity Entrepreneurship do?
Charity Entrepreneurship aims to strengthen the NGO sector by launching multiple new charities annually based on effective altruist principles.
It achieves this through an extensive research process that identifies high-impact, evidence-based ways to reduce suffering and a cost-covered Incubation Program that helps aspiring entrepreneurs launch these interventions. Its focus areas include health and development policy, mental health, family planning, and animal advocacy, and EA meta.
How it works:
- Each year, Charity Entrepreneurship puts thousands of research hours into identifying the most promising charity ideas. Its key criteria: highly cost-effective and ready to launch.
- It recruits aspiring entrepreneurs and, through its two-month Incubation Program, provides them with the training and funding to turn these ideas into high-impact organisations.
- It offers seed grants of up to $200,000, legal support, and ongoing mentorship to launch the most promising charities.
- Its ecosystem of researchers, volunteers, donors, and mentors enables these new charities to move quickly and achieve impact.
As of 2022, Charity Entrepreneurship has helped to launch 23 charities. These charities have already fundraised over $20 million USD and been recognised by top grantmakers like GiveWell, EA Funds, and Open Philanthropy. For example:
- Fortify Health has secured multiple GiveWell grants and has a 25% chance of joining GiveWell’s list of the world’s top charities.
- Suvita is helping over 200,000 caregivers in India and has been supported by Founders Pledge and Mulago Foundation.
- Shrimp Welfare Project has received grants from EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund and Animal Charity Evaluators Movement Grants fund.
- Lead Exposure Elimination Project is one of Giving What We Can's top charities and is recommended by Founders Pledge.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of Charity Entrepreneurship?
- Our research team believes it is doing impactful work across multiple high-impact causes.
- Some of its incubated charities have since been supported by impact-focused evaluators (for example, Founders Pledge highlighted the cost-effectiveness of Suvita in its grant report).
- To our knowledge, Charity Entrepreneurship has not yet been directly evaluated by any impact-focused evaluators.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.