Welcome to Better Futures Guide's first newsletter. We're going to use these newsletters to share what we're doing, what we're learning, and where we have open questions — and to invite you to weigh in on all three.
We launched Better Futures Guide to find and recommend high-impact livelihood organizations, and to publish that research openly. Since launching, we've had dozens of conversations with evaluators, researchers, philanthropic advisors, foundations, and nonprofit leaders across the livelihoods space. People have been incredibly generous with their time and thinking, getting us information faster than the pace of publication, more targeted than any paper, and more candid than either. Here's where all of that – along with hundreds of hours of research – has taken us.
In this newsletter, we:
- Announce our year one sectors
- Describe how we're designing our evaluations for use
- Share the first contours of our evaluation framework
- Discuss two open questions shaping our approach
- Outline what's next
The Three Sectors We're Evaluating in Year One
Livelihoods is a vast space. To choose our year one sectors, we started from the full landscape of livelihood interventions, and filtered against several criteria: the strength of the evidence base, the degree to which the sector's interventions could plausibly improve people's economic wellbeing, and the likelihood that rigorous evaluation could surface recommendations donors aren't already getting elsewhere. We also wanted a selection diverse enough to stress-test our methodology across different types of evidence.
We selected three sectors for deep evaluation in year one: poverty graduation, education, and cross-border livelihoods.
1. Poverty Graduation
Poverty graduation programs are among the most rigorously studied interventions in livelihoods. Large RCTs across low- and middle-income countries show durable income gains, with some longitudinal studies tracking outcomes past a decade. In these programs, over the course of 18-24 months, participants living in extreme poverty receive a sequenced package: a productive asset, cash to cover basic needs while they build a livelihood, skills training, and coaching.
But outcomes vary enormously across program design and implementation. The difference between a well-run graduation program and a poorly designed or implemented one can be the difference between lasting economic gains and no measurable impact at all – which is part of what makes this sector worth evaluating carefully.
2. Education for Livelihoods
Education has long been considered a gateway to an improved livelihood, and basic literacy and numeracy can open the door to greater economic self-sufficiency. We'll consider education interventions when robust evidence ties them to economic gains – such as structured pedagogy, foundational learning, and livelihoods-focused educational programs that target near-term income gains.
Education also has a longer research history than many other livelihood sectors, which will help us calibrate the range of evidence we want to incorporate into our overall methodology.Alongside its research value, several philanthropic advisors have told us that effectiveness-minded donors want to give to education but lack evaluations that speak to their worldview. We believe recommendations in this sector would meet real donor demand. As with poverty graduation, our focus will be on identifying which organizations excel both at program design and cost-effective implementation.
3. Cross-Border Livelihoods
The same person doing the same job can earn vastly different wages in two different countries or regions, even after adjusting for purchasing power. Moving into employment abroad, or even across rural-urban divides, can mean tens of thousands of dollars more in lifetime earnings. This makes labor mobility one of the highest-return interventions in development economics on a per-person basis.
Current demographics also make this sector a growing opportunity: aging populations in wealthy countries have vacant jobs with no young people to fill them, and many visa programs are expanding. The binding constraint is often logistics – affording the upfront costs of moving, navigating months of visa paperwork, or bridging the gap between job-seekers and the employers who need them.
Some interventions in this space are nearly self-sustaining (employer-pays models, student loan programs), often making them highly cost effective. However, while the evidence on wage gains is strong, the nonprofit landscape here is thinner and less well-mapped than in our other two sectors. We think this gap between the strength of the evidence and the scarcity of evaluation is itself another reason to look closely. Our focus will be on identifying the most cost-effective organizations in the field, whether established or earlier-stage. This sector will particularly serve donors comfortable giving where expected value is high but organizational track records are still developing.
Designing for Use
The signal has been strong from our livelihoods-dedicated, effectiveness-minded donors: they want rigorous evaluation, and there appears to be real, unmet demand.
But demand alone doesn't guarantee we'll communicate our findings in ways that actually move counterfactual dollars to high-impact organizations. We're currently talking to as many effectiveness-minded donors and philanthropic advisors as we can – to learn what would make our evaluations worth acting on. Want to help shape our research? If you — or someone you know — would give our strategic approach or early drafts candid feedback, please reply directly or reach us at info@betterfuturesguide.org.
Building our Evaluation Framework
We've outlined our evaluation framework, drawing on both traditional evaluation literature and the effectiveness-focused evaluator landscape. Cost-effectiveness will be our primary ranking criterion.
We'll use three additional criteria — evidence of effectiveness (e.g., well-designed RCTs, strong monitoring and evaluation, replication across contexts), room for more funding, and organizational quality — to filter and further differentiate among programs. Where programs are otherwise comparable, we plan to use non-livelihood co-benefits and gap-filling in the existing evaluator ecosystem as tie-breakers.
We're actively developing this framework and expect it to evolve. We plan to publish a transparent methods note in early summer and road-test it with advisors and a pilot evaluation before it informs any recommendations.
Open Questions
How we can best be additive: An evaluator is one node in a larger network – funders, researchers, incubators, advisors, and nonprofits all play distinct roles. The question we keep returning to is: where do we add the most counterfactual value to the system as a whole? For instance, that means not just asking "what's the highest-impact research?" but "what's the highest-impact research that wouldn't otherwise be done?" We're in close contact with GiveWell, Founders Pledge, and others to make sure we're not duplicating effort.
Which organizations we're best positioned to help: We initially assumed that our path to impact would include identifying scaled organizations that could absorb large amounts of funding – a model that finds efficiency through relatively few, deep-dive recommendations per year. But some experts have told us the largest livelihood orgs are already well-known to major funders. If we confirm that, our highest counterfactual value won't be in evaluating organizations that donors have already found. It may instead be in surfacing smaller organizations stuck in the funding valley of death between seed stage and donor visibility, or identifying high-potential early-stage orgs implementing well-evidenced interventions but lacking a lengthy track record of their own. We're prioritizing investigating this and welcome any input.
Our Next Steps
Methods document and pilot: We'll publish a transparent document describing our evaluation methodology in early summer, then begin piloting it with real organizations.
Conferences: We're in Oxford for Skoll World Forum and we'll be at EAG London – please reach out if you'll be at either and would like to connect.
First recommendations: Our target remains publishing our first set of charity recommendations before the end-of-year giving season.
Ideas, suggestions, or feedback? Please get in touch.