If our decisions are not to be based on faith then what should guide us? Most people, I hope, would answer, “evidence” but most of the time, other factors get in the way. It can be easy to simply follow the crowd or opt just for what “feels” right. This is especially common when it comes to supporting charities; the heart wins out over the head. Investing in condoms and sex-education can be as many as 250 times more affective at preventing HIV/ AIDS deaths as investing in drugs to treat those who already have it, yet this goes relatively underfunded against the emotional instinct to help those who are already sick.

So when it came to choosing a charity for our annual Non Prophet Week, we wanted to keep things as rational and evidence based as possible. We chose to focus on getting the most bang for your bucks; making sure that if your money could make a bigger difference elsewhere, that’s exactly where it went. We also needed to choose just what we wanted the charity to be up to. This is a more emotional question- can we really compare side-by-side the work done by a charity that provides free books for children to one that helps sick hedgehogs to one that helps refugees? We went for the simplest, bluntest measure we could; who saves the most lives for the least money? This doesn’t make charity that isn’t aimed at saving lives a waste of time; the BHA, after all, is a charity that doesn’t go out saving babies from burning buildings and yet we are proud to be partnered with them. But the BHA can be helped in many non-financial ways; saving lives, on the other hand, is a costly business. In fact the US government, when investing in road works, sets a maximum cost of around $2 million per America life. So if a new set of traffic lights will save 4 lives in its lifetime, they’ll spend up to $8 million on them.

Luckily for the AHS, although depressingly in terms of global inequality, some lives are much cheaper to save than others. Working out just how much it costs to save a life is a difficult and painstaking process but there are organisations out there doing it such as GiveWell, the charity evaluators. With cost-per-life-saved as our guide, the best charity for NPW was clear- the Against Malaria Foundation. Keep in mind that $2 million price tag for saving an American life. The AMF save one life for every $2,500. Not only do they save lives, in preventing malaria (by distributing mosquito nets), they prevent a great deal of suffering for those who would have caught the disease but survived. They also boost local economies by keeping people in work rather than off, ill. They boost education by keeping children and teachers in school. Each net is delivered at a total cost of $5.50. You can see more of the GiveWell evaluation here–

So that’s why we chose them. I hope you’re as excited about their work as we are- judging by the money we’ve raised in the past, we stand to save quite a few lives in this week of fundraising. The big question remaining is just how will you do it? The next few weeks are your chance to get thinking about raising dollah. The exec will be too- I’ve already ended up agreeing to a Creme Egg eating competition with the BHA’s webmaster. Let us know your ideas and we’ll get them on Twitter with #NonProphetWeek and Facebook. Let’s save some lives.