Good Ventures/GiveWell top and standout charities donations made to Small Enterprise Foundation

This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.

Table of contents

Basic donor information

ItemValue
Country United States
Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions)GiveWell Good Ventures Open Philanthropy
Regularity with which donor updates donations datacontinuous updates
Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)continuous updates
Lag with which donor updates donations datamonths
Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update)days
Data entry method on Donations List WebsiteManual (no scripts used)

Brief history: Starting in 2011, when GiveWell first started working with Good Ventures, Good Ventures has been making grants to GiveWell top and standout charities. Over time, they have worked more closely together on deciding the amounts to be granted, and incorporating these into the room for more funding that is communicated to other donors. The grants are almost always announced along with the year-end recommendation refresh in late November. Starting 2016, the decision of "how much in total to allocate" was moved over to Open Philanthropy, and the grants began being listed in Open Philanthropy database. The decision on how to split the allocation between specific top and standout charities remains with GiveWell

Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: The focus areas are the areas that GiveWell top and standout charities operate in, which are usually global health and development. Top areas in recent years have included malaria, deworming, vitamin A supplementation, cash transfers, and seasonal intracountry migration

Notes on grant decision logistics: GiveWell receives a total budget from Open Philanthropy of money that can be granted to top charities. The budget was $50 million in end 2016 and $75 million in end 2017. It grants some minimum amount to all top charities ($2.5 million per charity in 2017) and a smaller minimum amoun to all standout charities ($100,000 in 2017). For the rest of its total allocated amount, it allocates the money to the highest-priority funding gaps, using a greedy algorithm. Some top charities may end up getting no money other than the $2.5 million minimum. According to https://blog.givewell.org/2017/11/27/our-top-charities-for-giving-season-2017/#comment-946042 the willingness of other donors to fund specific charities is not a factor in the decision

Notes on grant publication logistics: The grants are not published separately on the GiveWell website; rather, the amounts and rationale are described in a long blog post along with the description of the refreshed top charity recommendations (see https://blog.givewell.org/2017/11/27/our-top-charities-for-giving-season-2017/ for the 2017 version). The grants later show up in the databases of Open Philanthropy (that signs off on them, despite not being involved in the individual grant decisions) and Good Ventures (that provides the actual financing)

Notes on grant financing: The financing for the grants comes from Good Ventures, which may give the money directly or via the Open Philanthropy Project Fund held by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The total budget is set by Open Philanthropy. The actual grants are usually made between December and February, after the announcement of the grant amounts in November.

Miscellaneous notes: For grants already published in the Good Ventures database, we use the date there as the authoritative grant date. For grants not yet published, we use the date of the donation announcement

Full donor page for donor Good Ventures/GiveWell top and standout charities

Basic donee information

ItemValue
Country
Wikipedia pagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Enterprise_Foundation

Full donee page for donee Small Enterprise Foundation

Donor–donee relationship

Item Value

Donor–donee donation statistics

Cause areaCountMedianMeanMinimum10th percentile 20th percentile 30th percentile 40th percentile 50th percentile 60th percentile 70th percentile 80th percentile 90th percentile Maximum
Overall 1 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000
Microloans 1 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000

Donation amounts by cause area and year

If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.

Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.

Cause area Number of donations Total 2012
Microloans (filter this donor) 1 50,000.00 50,000.00
Total 1 50,000.00 50,000.00

Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.

Full list of documents in reverse chronological order (0 documents)

There are no documents associated with this combination of donor and donee.

Full list of donations in reverse chronological order (1 donations)

Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations

Graph of donations and their timeframes
Amount (current USD)Amount rank (out of 1)Donation dateCause areaURLInfluencerNotes
50,000.0012012-05Microloans/global povertyhttp://www.goodventures.org/our-portfolio/grants/small-enterprise-foundation-general-support-may-2012GiveWell Grant to support SEF’s efforts to help alleviate poverty by providing microloans to women in South Africa. Along with grants to five other standout charities, see http://www.goodventures.org/research-and-ideas/blog/grants-to-standout-charities from 2012-08-06. Affected countries: South Africa.