“Revisiting Well, Well, Well…Do Wells Clear the Bar?” by Zach Gilfix, Sarah Jo DeVore, Mark McDonald

This post is an update on EA Salt Lake City's evaluation of Wells4Wellness, an organization that drills and maintains wells in Niger. Big thank you to Willie Herath, director of operations at Wells4Wellness, for taking the time to answer our questions over the last couple months! TLDR: We’ve found that drilling wells in Niger easily clears GiveWell and Coefficient Giving's “Bar” and we think donors interested in global health should consider donating. Part 1: Revising our estimates In our original post, we estimated that Wells4Wellness is ~5-10x more cost effective than chlorination, the current golden child of water sanitation and hygiene interventions. We got some good feedback from a few readers, talked to the director of operations at Wells4Wellness, and updated our estimates: We found a few more studies (see here, here, and here) around the reduction in diarrhea mortality due to wells. We think anywhere in the 12-18% range is reasonable, and we’ll use 16% for our calculations. Based on details from Wells4Wellness, we updated the construction cost per well from $10,000 to $7,000, with maintenance costs remaining at $200/year. We also had a typo in our original cost estimates, which is corrected below. We continue to have high [...] ---Outline:(00:43) Part 1: Revising our estimates(03:39) Part 2: Scaling & the awkward fit of smaller charities in the EA ecosystem(06:58) Part 3: Process & Experience(12:14) Conclusion --- First published: December 23rd, 2025 Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WjLj6Chs2iz9qTvwX/revisiting-well-well-well-do-wells-clear-the-bar --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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