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.
I'm sympathetic and had precisely the same initial reaction to GiveWell's recommendations when I encountered them a little more than a year ago.
Encouragingly, as Unnamed mentioned, some charities that improve health in the developing world may have long term positive impact.
Unfortunately, I haven't yet encountered programs with encouraging evidence of impact that aim to improve reproductive health and/or women's rights directly. My rough impression is that there seem to be serious difficulties engaging with such complex issues as an outsider to the relevant cultures. This is in line with jsalvatier's comment.
At the same time, there's more research to be done on this point. My impression is that GiveWell does plan to cover more international causes over time. For the time being they've written a Do-It-Yourself charity evaluation guide for donors interested in causes that they haven't yet covered.
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.