The Maximize Your Impact Fund is our recommendation for donors who want to support evidence-driven charities working on key characteristics of extreme poverty, including education, health, living standards, and barriers to women and girls’ well-being. You benefit from our data with optimized funding grants managed by our team who allocate your gift to address time-sensitive needs on behalf of our recommended charities. This matches your donor funding with the highest-impact giving opportunities.
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Key Strengths: Evidence, Scale, Depth of impact, Durability
Multidimensional Poverty Index Indicators: Child mortality, Nutrition, Years of schooling, School attendance, Housing, Electricity, Cooking fuel, Sanitation, Drinking water
Other Key Outcomes: Physical safety, Improved health, Psychological well-being, Reduced early pregnancy rates, Agency
Extreme poverty encompasses various characteristics that profoundly impact individuals’ ability to meet their family’s needs and to lead the lives they aspire to. The Maximize Your Impact Fund is a reflection of our commitment to addressing multidimensional poverty, with characteristics identified in the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). The charities benefiting from the Maximize Your Impact Fund cover a wide range of interventions in health, education, living standards, and barriers to women and girls’ well-being. When you donate to the Maximize Your Impact Fund, you support their efforts in having an impact across all the indicators of multidimensional poverty. All the causes we address in our other funds are also funded within the Maximize Your Impact Fund. By donating to the Maximize Your Impact Fund, our fund managers are able to fulfill your impact goals, reaching the most people possible and uplifting the most vulnerable communities.
Source: Alkire, S., Kanagaratnam, U. and Suppa, N. (2020). ‘The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI): 2020 revision’, OPHI MPI Methodological Note 49, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, University of Oxford.
| Dimension | Indicator | Deprived if living in a household where… | Weight |
| Health (1/3) | Nutrition | Any person under 70 years of age for whom there is nutritional information is undernourished. | 1/6 |
| Child mortality | A child under 18 has died in the household in the five-year period preceding the survey. | 1/6 | |
| Education (1/3) | Years of schooling | No eligible household member has completed six years of schooling. | 1/6 |
| School attendance | Any school-aged child is not attending school up to the age at which he/she would complete class 8. | 1/6 | |
| Living Standards (1/3) | Cooking fuel | A household cooks using solid fuel, such as dung, agricultural crop, shrubs, wood, charcoal, or coal. | 1/18 |
| Sanitation | The household has unimproved or no sanitation facility or it is improved but shared with other households. | 1/18 | |
| Drinking water | The household’s source of drinking water is not safe or safe drinking water is a 30-minute or longer walk from home, roundtrip. | 1/18 | |
| Electricity | The household has no electricity. | 1/18 | |
| Housing | The household has inadequate housing materials in any of the three components: floor, roof, or walls. | 1/18 | |
| Assets | The household does not own more than one of these assets: radio, TV, telephone, computer, animal cart, bicycle, motorbike, or refrigerator, and does not own a car or truck. | 1/18 |
The Maximize Your Impact Fund is comprised of our recommendations that create impact across the three dimensions of multidimensional poverty: health, education, and living standards. Additionally, while women and girls well-being is not a specific dimension in the MPI, it is also accounted for in our recommendations. Poverty is multifaceted and this fund works to break barriers to well-being and support holistic solutions to advance human development. Children cannot learn if they are hungry and malnourished. Parents cannot support their families through gainful employment if they are sick from not having access to clean drinking water. We understand that singular solutions in isolation cannot solve the complex problems created and sustained by extreme poverty. The Maximize Your Impact Fund allows donors to support a diverse array of solutions and charities that actively create opportunities for individual and community prosperity across all of the dimensions of poverty.
Our research team works closely with our recommended charities, actively monitoring their progress on key outcomes. These outcomes span across various dimensions and indicators of the Multidimensional Poverty Index. We explore the sources of impact metrics, ranging from internal monitoring and evaluation data, to external impact evaluations, including randomized controlled trials. In evaluating the impact of our recommended charities and projecting their future potential, we analyze the convergence of evidence from diverse sources, including external evaluations and the broader literature on specific interventions. Additionally, we assess the impact of our grants and their ability to strengthen the ecosystem of high-impact organizations. Key questions are central to these evaluations, such as:
The successful scaling and increased financial backing of our recommended charities serve as indicators of achievement for our team.
Read more about how we measure impact
To learn more about our research and evaluation process, please refer to the following links:
The Maximize Your Impact Fund combines all of our research, strategic pooling, and allocation of resources that we apply for each of our funds. Our research team establishes annual funding goals for each recommended charity through our ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and understanding of funding needs across our fund of recommendations. These goals inform the percentage allocated to each charity within the fund.
We actively review funding goals and determine fund allocations every six months. You have the option of giving 100% to charities – or sending 90% of your donation to the charities and 10% towards our operations. We give this option because we do not charge donors fees, but rather raise funds for our own operations separately.
Against Malaria Foundation works to prevent the spread of malaria by distributing long-lasting, insecticide-treated mosquito nets to susceptible populations in poor countries. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Breakthrough Trust works on culture-based change in India, focusing their programs on girls and boys aged 11 to 24. They partner with the government and help redesign school curricula to include material on gendered violence, as well as running mass media campaigns to reach a large audience. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Development Media International runs large-scale media campaigns in low-income countries to create informative and engaging programming that focuses on maternal and child health, nutrition, hygiene and sanitation, sexual reproductive health, and early childhood development. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Educate Girls aims to provide equitable access to education for all girls in India. Its primary beneficiaries are out-of-school girls in rural communities. They strive to boost school enrollment and learning with local volunteers who mobilize parents and communities and by delivering supplementary remedial learning curriculum. Their annual demonstrated impact includes [1]:
Evidence Action scales low-cost health interventions that improve the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia. The organization currently has four programs: Safe Water Now, Deworm the World, Equal Vitamin Access, and Syphilis-Free Start. Evidence Action’s Accelerator drives new program development, refining high-potential and cost-effective interventions.
Their demonstrated impact includes:
GiveDirectly provides unconditional cash transfers using cellphone technology to some of the world’s poorest people, as well as refugees, urban youth, and disaster victims. They also are currently running a historic Universal Basic Income initiative, delivering a basic income to 20,000+ people in Kenya in a twelve-year study. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Living Goods supports and trains local community health workers, the majority of whom are women, to deliver lifesaving medicines, health education, diagnoses, and health products to millions of people who need them in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda. They focus especially on preventing and treating the leading causes of child deaths. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Sanku – Project Healthy Children’s mission is to provide children everywhere with the simple, inexpensive, basic nutritional support they require to survive and thrive. Sanku – Project Healthy Children focuses on achieving wide micronutrient coverage for at risk communities in Africa.
Teaching at the Right Level Africa aims to ensure that in over 12 countries and counting across Africa, every child is being taught effectively. Rather than strictly focusing on age-based curriculum requirements, a practice that leaves students behind without opportunities to catch up, their approach involves teaching students at their actual learning levels. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Raising The Village (RTV) partners with last mile communities in Sub-Saharan Africa to address ultra-poverty with a holistic, data-informed, and sustainable model that increases household income and earnings to over $2.00/day within 24 months.
Seva is a global eye care nonprofit whose mission is to transform lives and strengthen communities by restoring sight and preventing blindness. Seva works with underserved communities in more than 20 countries across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Unlimit Health works with Ministries of Health and Education in sub-Saharan African countries to support programs controlling and eliminating two types of parasitic worm infections: schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiasis. The majority of programs treat school-aged children, but can also include at risk adults. Their annual demonstrated impact includes:
Our team works to recommend high-impact donations. Contact us if you have questions about giving to the Maximize Your Impact Fund.
