My wife runs an early stage charity called New Incentives supported by Givewell, hoping to become a candidate for their top charity recommendation.<p>They use an evidence-backed model called conditional cash transfers. They give money to disadvantaged pregnant women when they achieve health goals that increase the probability of their child's survival (example: activities to reduce HIV transmission from mothers to babies).<p>The whole organization is a mobile-first organization using biometrics for verification (because technology is the best way to cut across corruption) and they work on many interesting operational challenges. The organization could really use the help of more engineers, especially Android app developers, to tackle some of these challenges.<p>If anyone is interested, please respond to this comment or ping me.
Not sure if it would be helpful, but I'd love to do a charity someday which focused on providing infrastructure services (power, communications, medical support (testing and other things to make local doctors more effective), logistics, data, maybe utility restoration) in disaster and especially conflict zones. Essentially what the US Military can accomplish on its own bases, as a service for other NGOs (easier) and for local population (harder). Being able to secure part of an airfield, run logistics and communications which are head ends for domestic infrastructure, would be a huge improvement in quality of life for the civilians stuck in these places.<p>There's a void in the NGO and commercial space between people who do good stuff, and people who can provide security and operate in denied areas. Some orgs like MSF can operate in semi-permissive environments, but not as well as states can. There are a lot of downsides to state involvement in this kind of thing -- unless you're neutral, it's really hard to get involved in a lot of conflicts, and states are pretty horrible at providing IT services in general, and have all kinds of incentives to scale too big/inefficiently.
On this topic, the recent doc "Poverty, Inc" is probably worth a watch. Giving well is more than getting a good buck for the dollar - it's also thinking about the second order effects of your donation.<p>(Note that there are <i>two</i> films with the same name launched around the same time. This is the one by Michael Miller, not the one by Gary Null.)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.povertyinc.org/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.povertyinc.org/about/</a>