EAA and EAAE (Environment) are refining how we select charity partners to ensure we are providing Australians with the highest-confidence opportunities to do good.
In order to fulfil our purpose of providing Australians with the highest-impact options to relieve poverty and illness, based on evidence and reason, we recently conducted a review of our charity partnership model, alongside our internal resourcing.
As an outcome of that review, we have made the decision to refine our charity partnership model, to more closely align with specific external charity evaluators who are conducting high-quality research on the most impactful donation opportunities.
Here is why we are making this change, and what it means for our donors and partners.
The challenge of evaluation
Determining the true impact of a charity is incredibly complex. It requires dedicated teams of researchers and analysts to deeply scrutinise data and determine how much “good” a specific program achieves per dollar spent.
Our review concluded that EAA does not possess the specialist in-house research capacity required to evaluate diverse programs with the same rigour as organisations dedicated entirely to that task.
We believe that attempting to maintain our own standalone list of partners, without that deep internal evaluation capacity, risks falling short of our promise to direct donors only to the highest-impact opportunities.
Our new strategic focus
To ensure we are truly directing Australians to the best available evidence, EAA and EAAE will be shifting away from maintaining our own curated partner list.
Moving forward, our platform will focus exclusively on three pillars of high-impact giving:
- The global health specialists: GiveWell. We will align our global health and poverty recommendations with GiveWell. Their world-leading research identifies charities that save or improve lives the most per dollar.
- The climate change specialists: Giving Green. We will align our climate recommendations with Giving Green, aligning with their rigorous assessment of high-impact climate initiatives. This applies to our sister charity: Effective Altruism Australia Environment.
- The global cash benchmark: GiveDirectly. In the field of evidence-based development, unconditional cash transfers serve as the foundational “benchmark” against which other interventions are measured. While we rely on evaluators to identify programs that are more cost-effective than cash, we believe retaining the “gold standard” of cash transfers provides a vital baseline option for Australian donors. Therefore, we will retain GiveDirectly as a foundational partner.
By narrowing our focus to these three pillars, we are playing to our strengths. EAA can focus on what we do best—advocating for effective giving and enabling tax-deductible donations for Australians—while relying on some of the world’s best external evidence bases to support us in determining where those funds should go.
What this means for our partner charities
As a result of this strategic shift, we will be transitioning several valued partners off the EAA platform over a 10-month period, concluding on December 31st, 2026.
This is a principled decision about EAA’s strategy, not a negative judgement on the quality or impact of the charities leaving our platform.
We have worked with these organisations because they do vital work. However, as they do not fall into the specific evaluation pillars outlined above, we can no longer host them on our platform while adhering to the updated partnership strategy.
The partners we will be offboarding are:
- Unlimit Health
- Evidence Action’s Deworm the World
- One Acre Fund
- StrongMinds
What this means for donors
We are committed to a responsible transition for the charities we are offboarding, and for the donors who support them.
If you currently support one of the affected charities, there is no immediate change. You can continue to donate to them via EAA until the end of 2026.
Looking ahead, we are coordinating closely with The Life You Can Save Australia, another impact and evidence-focused evaluator that continues to recommend some of the charities we will be offboarding. Our shared goal is to ensure that, where possible, a clear pathway remains for Australian donors to continue supporting these transitioning charities tax-deductibly through their platform after 2026, with the exception of StrongMinds.
You can view their charity pages on The Life You Can Save’s website:
From 2027, Donors who wish to continue supporting StrongMinds, can donate without a tax-deduction via their US website.
We believe this refined focus will ultimately lead to more lives saved and improved. By deferring to single evaluators of the highest quality, we can offer Australian donors even greater confidence that their generosity is achieving the greatest possible good.
Please feel reach to contact us to talk about this change. We appreciate our community’s ongoing support for high-impact, and cost-effective charities.
Caption for featured photo: Naja’atu Yakub, with her child Umar Yakub, being served by immunisation provider Najib Musa Gogel. Courtesy of New Incentives.
