The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and Project Healthy Children (PHC) have recently announced a partnership to improve the quality and delivery of one of the world's most cost-effective interventions: food fortification.

Anyone who thinks about their ethical obligations will rightly decide that - since, no matter what we do, not everyone will give even 1% - they should do more.

I believe one of the important things development programs should focus on is not only providing the resources required to lift people out of poverty, but to also provide training on what to do once they begin generating an income, so poverty reduction is more sustainable.

If artists, art critics, and art buyers really had any interest in reducing the widening gap between the rich and the poor, they would be focusing their efforts on developing countries, where spending a few thousand dollars on the purchase of works by indigenous artists could make a real difference to the wellbeing of entire villages.

Development Media International uses mass media campaigns to raise awareness of public health risks and change behaviors in developing countries, using rigorous analyses to test the campaigns' effectiveness and estimate how many lives they save.

The well-founded and well-documented criticism that has been lobbed at Mother Teresa since the mid-1990s has largely failed to shake her public perception as a saint. Her upcoming canonization begs the question how this is possible and what, if anything, we can we learn from this for our own giving habits.

The average American household gives $2,974 to charity each year. How far could that amount go to alleviating hunger and malnutrition in the developing world?

In the struggle against global poverty, is gender equality an impactful goal we should focus on and strive towards?

By following the Gates Foundation's principle that "all lives have equal value," you can dramatically increase the impact of your giving.

Some time ago, I had a conversation with a friend about charitable giving. She said that one of the reasons she was giving locally rather than globally was that she felt more in control about where the money goes. But do you really have more control? And what does that mean for those in need?

Globally about 16,000 children under the age of five die each day—most from preventable conditions associated with poverty. That’s a staggering number. At that rate, this means that more than 11 children die unnecessarily every single minute. In the five or so minutes it will take you to read this blog post, more than 55 children will have lost their lives to extreme poverty.

Behind each of these neatly summarized findings (from the U.S. Agency for International Development's Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program) lie stories of personal hardship, risks, and logistical challenges faced by data gatherers—the unsung heroes of international health and poverty research.

For those of us whose awareness and behavior are not so inherently or concertedly altruistic, I believe we can follow a program wherein we intentionally build up our consciousness and actions to alter our “normal” giving behavior so it more closely aligns with our goals and values around protecting lives; we can escape, or redefine, normal. By following these steps, we can become more educated about effective giving and build elements into our lives that help us remain aware of and committed...

One reason for the poverty/giving disconnect is that our brains are not equipped to focus on multiple variables simultaneously, so we prioritize those needing immediate attention. This can explain at least part of why we have trouble keeping in mind what the global poor are going through when our teenage child is having a social crisis, or our spouse wants a kitchen remodel.

There is a disconnect for many of us between the supreme moral value we place on human life and the way we are able to tune out awareness of the millions of people globally who are caught in a downward spiral because they had the misfortune to be born into extreme poverty. In principle, we feel all people deserve a chance to have a happy, healthy life, yet we turn a blind eye to the 702 million people who live (or try to live) on less than $1.90 per day.

Anger and dismay greeted the March 10 announcement that the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit that helps wounded veterans, fired its top staff, who spent millions of donor dollars on first-class airfare, employee retreats, and extravagant salaries. Each of us can protect ourselves from falling victim to such scandals by combining the impulses of giving from the heart with the direction of the head to become a more effective donor.

Giving Games are workshop-style events aimed to advance philanthropic education. Participants learn about a couple of pre-selected charities, think about and discuss their personal values and reasons for giving, consider what methods and metrics they should use to select a charity, and then vote on what charity will get a real donation.

Subsistence agriculture accounts for the largest economic activity in the developing world, and a majority of the global poor rely on small-scale farming to support themselves and their families. One Acre Fund empowers farmers to increase their crop harvests and farm profitability, and in the process, helps reduce hunger in remote regions in East Africa.

From picking a worthy charity to making your contribution go further, there's a lot to learn about how to be the most effective altruist you can be. Here are 4 essential tips for making your donation.

For years, I’ve been putting almond butter on my toast every morning. Tasty, filling, and nutritious, it felt like a good way to start my day. But the price of almonds where I live has nearly doubled in recent years, due to a combination of higher demand and smaller yields from drought-striken California. A few months ago, I gasped when I saw the price of a 1-pound jar of almond butter at my local market: it was more than $15. I was going through a pound of almond butter roughly every 10...

Addictions therapy and research might have something to teach us about barriers. Perhaps the key to giving more is understanding the nature of and learning to modulate our urge to spend.

Question and Answers session after Peter's talk at George Washington University.

You've been wanting to donate money to help the poor for a while now, but there's just so much to think about: You want your money to go to the right place, you want it to do the most good it can do, and you want to be sure it's used the way it should be.

Let’s make the effort to donate the inconvenient way. That could mean writing a check instead of typing in your credit card number, or spending an hour learning about what a potential charity recipient will do with your donation.

If we accept the premise that human lives are equal regardless of their circumstances, then we also accept that each of us has the power to alter those circumstances for the better.