EA - Global Innovation Fund projects its impact to be 3x GiveWell Top Charities by jh

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Global Innovation Fund projects its impact to be 3x GiveWell Top Charities, published by jh on June 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The Global Innovation Fund (GIF) is a non-profit, impact-first investment fund headquartered in London that primarily works with mission-aligned development agencies (USAID, SIDA, Global Affairs Canada, UKAID). Through grants, loans and equity investments, they back innovations with the potential for social impact at a large scale, whether these are new technologies, business models, policy practices or behavioural insights.Recently, they made a bold but little publicized projection in their 2022 Impact Report (page 18): "We project every dollar that GIF has invested to date will be three times as impactful as if that dollar had been spent on long-lasting, insecticide-treated bednets... This is three times higher than the impact per dollar of Givewell’s top-rated charities, including distribution of anti-malarial insecticide-treated bednets. By Givewell’s estimation, their top charities are 10 times as cost-effective as cash transfers." The report says they have invested $112m since 2015.This is a short post to highlight GIF's projection to the EA community and to invite comments and reactions.Here are a few initial points:It's exciting to see an organization with relatively traditional funders comparing its impact to GiveWell's top charities (as well as cash transfers).I would want to see more information on how they did their calculations before taking a view on their projection.In any case, based on my conversations with GIF, and what I've understood about their methodology, I think their projection should be taken seriously. I can see many ways it could be either an overestimate or an underestimate.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org