Every charity appeal implies an exchange rate between your money and the world getting better. Usually the rate is left to your imagination. But a meaningful number of organisations publish explicit figures — a bednet costs this, a meal costs that — and once you put those published figures side by side, giving starts to look less like a leap of faith and more like a decision you can actually reason about.
Below is what $100 converts to at some of the organisations in our rankings, using only figures each organisation publishes about its own programs. (That restriction matters more than it sounds — we audited every figure on this site against its source, and numbers without published backing were removed.)
What $100 buys, by the charities' own accounting
- ≈ 50 insecticide-treated bednets — Against Malaria Foundation puts a net at about $2, and public donations go entirely to nets.
- ≈ 125 days of meals for a child — the World Food Programme's ShareTheMeal figure is $0.80 per child per day (WFP USA).
- ≈ 1,000 meals secured and distributed — Feeding America's published claim: every $1 helps provide at least 10 meals through its food-bank network.
- ≈ 434 trachoma treatments — Sightsavers prices a sight-saving trachoma treatment at $0.23. (A cataract surgery, for comparison, is about $41.)
- ≈ 200 deworming treatments — Evidence Action's Deworm the World reports roughly $0.50 per child treated.
- ≈ 14 children protected for a full malaria season — Malaria Consortium's seasonal chemoprevention runs about $7 per child per season.
- ≈ 4 people gaining lasting access to safe water — Water.org's published $25-per-person figure.
- ≈ 2 years of a child's literacy programming — Room to Read: $50 funds a year in its literacy program.
- ≈ $85 delivered directly as cash — GiveDirectly reports roughly 85 cents of each donated dollar reaching recipients in extreme poverty.
- ≈ $2,000–$3,000 worth of medicine delivered — the gifts-in-kind model: Americares and Direct Relief each publish roughly $20–30 of donated medical aid mobilised per dollar given.
Now the honest part: what these numbers are not
They are not audited outcomes. A published figure is an organisation's own accounting of its costs — a genuine, checkable commitment, but not an independent measurement of lives changed. GiveWell-style effectiveness analysis asks a harder question (how many of those bednets prevented a death that wouldn't otherwise have been prevented?) and gets smaller, more expensive answers. Both framings are legitimate; they answer different questions.
They are not comparable units. A trachoma treatment, a meal, and a dollar of gift-in-kind medicine are different goods. The gifts-in-kind figures especially reward a business model (redistributing donated pharmaceuticals) rather than measuring more good per dollar than a bednet does. Compare within a cause, not across the whole list.
Cheap is not the same as effective. The list rewards organisations that publish unit costs, and quantifiability is easiest for commodity-like interventions. Some excellent organisations — research institutes, advocacy groups, emergency medical teams — publish no per-unit figure because their work honestly doesn't reduce to one. On their profiles we say what your money supports instead of inventing a number.
How to use this
If your goal is maximum measurable global-health impact per dollar, the top of this list — bednets, seasonal malaria prevention, deworming, vitamin A — is where the evidence is deepest, which is why those organisations also top our overall rankings. If your heart is set on another cause, the same logic applies within it: prefer organisations that publish their unit costs and their evidence. And whatever you choose, our Giving Basket will split a budget across several of them and show you the combined estimate in your profile.