In regard to
Also, Village Reach works to improve health clinics and the logistics of delivering medical supplies, so that the health system can better (and more efficiently) meet people's medical needs.
See Holden's blog post titled Health system strengthening + sustainability + accountability in which Holden argues:
...VillageReach has some other major strengths as well - strengths that make it a good fit not just for individual donors looking to help people cost-effectively, but also for more ambitious donors hoping to contribute to transformative change.
That does look very good indeed. I'm not sure I'd consider it the single best place for my money to go, but given limited time and the complexity of the problem, I think it may be worthwhile cause for this years' batch of charity/holiday-warm-fuzzies-purchasing.
I'm not sure if this necessarily warrants a new discussion, or if there's an existing article/thread that addresses this topic.
There's a lot of discussion recently about charity, and how to give effectively. I've been looking over givewell.org and it definitely is the single most important thing I've found on lesswrong. But one discouraging thing is that by focusing on easy to measure charities, there's not a lot of info on charities that are trying to accomplish long term less measurable goals. The best charity there that matches my priorities was an educational agency in India that put a lot of emphasis on self improvement.
My *think* my ideal charity would be something similar to Heifer International, but which also focuses on reproductive health and/or women's rights. Feeding people fish for a day means you just need to feed them again tomorrow, and if they have a bunch of kids you haven't necessarily accomplished anything. From what I've read, in places where the standard of living improves and women get more equality, overpopulation becomes less of an issue. So it seems to me that addressing those issues together in particular regions would produce sustainable longterm benefit. But Givewell doesn't seem to have a lot of information on those types of charities.