Why evidence-led giving has no home in India (yet)

India is in the middle of an unusual decade for private giving.

Domestic philanthropy crossed USD 16 billion in FY2024 and has grown at roughly 12% a year, driven largely by a new cohort of wealthy donors (Bain & Dasra, 2025). Many of them made their money by building or scaling companies, and they carry the habits of that world into their giving. They expect evidence before they commit capital, and they increasingly want to apply the same scrutiny to philanthropy: what does a given programme actually change, and how far can a dollar be stretched before the next one does more good elsewhere?

In India, that question is remarkably difficult to answer well.

A small number of organisations abroad were built to answer exactly this kind of question. GiveWell, Founders Pledge, and Coefficient Giving have collectively directed billions of dollars by doing patient, unglamorous analysis: identifying the interventions that deliver the most good per dollar and channeling serious money toward them. Their recommendations reach hundreds of millions of people. None of them work in India.

A donor here who wants to give well, then, has relatively little to lean on. They can follow reputation, a persuasive pitch, or the choices of their peers. Independent, evidence-led advice on where money will do the most good within a specific Indian cause area is largely unavailable, because the institutions that would produce it do not yet exist here.

The scale of that omission is worth pausing on. Around 160 million people in India still live in multidimensional poverty (NITI Aayog, 2022–23). One of the fastest-growing pools of philanthropic capital in the world is forming alongside one of the largest concentrations of need in the world, and the advisory layer that would connect the two, matching capital to high-impact work, is mostly absent.

We regard that gap as unusually tractable, which is part of why we started here.

The reasoning is straightforward. Donors early in their philanthropic lives tend to be open to guidance; they have not yet committed to fixed causes or ways of working, and advice offered early tends to shape where capital eventually settles. We have seen this directly.

In our first engagement, on agricultural livelihoods, a first-generation donor came to us with a broad ambition rather than a plan: to move large numbers of people onto a better path to income. We helped turn that ambition into a fundable thesis. Working from their larger vision, we identified who was most exposed to income stress, smallholder and marginal farmers, and then, through our research, the pathway most likely to raise their incomes: diversification into higher-value agriculture and allied activities. The engagement did two things at once. It directed a confident USD 1 million commitment toward evidence-backed organisations working in specific high-need states, and it changed how the donor thought about giving itself, so that their future philanthropy is likely to start from evidence rather than instinct.

That second effect is the one we care about most, and it is the work Raising Impact exists to do. We are an evidence-led advisory for philanthropists in India. We carry out the research most donors have neither the time nor the tools to do themselves, establishing where need is greatest, where philanthropic money has the most leverage, which interventions actually work, and which organisations can credibly deliver them, and we help capital flow accordingly.

There is a legitimate question about whether the methods developed abroad transfer to India at all. This is an evidence-scarce environment, and the randomised trials that often anchor a GiveWell recommendation frequently do not exist for an Indian intervention. Our response, which the rest of this series takes up in detail, is to hold the standard of rigour fixed while broadening what we are willing to count as evidence, rather than either relaxing the bar or overstating the strength of what we have. Managing that tension between rigour and a thin evidence base is most of the job.

We are a small team, and we work deliberately in the open. We would rather set out our reasoning and invite disagreement than issue verdicts. In the pieces that follow, we describe how we work in practice: how we select a cause area, how we interrogate it, how we test our desk research against people working on the ground, and how we decide when the evidence is strong enough to move money.

The takeaway: India’s philanthropic capital is growing quickly, but the infrastructure needed to deploy it well has not kept pace. Closing that gap, one well-advised commitment at a time, is why we exist.

Raising Impact is an evidence-led philanthropy advisory. If you are a donor who wants your giving to be guided by evidence, we would love to talk: info@raisingimpact.org