You know that most AIDS prevention charities are a giant waste of money? There is almost no metric with which they are measured - so people keep doing the same thing over and over.
With private colleges the metric is fairly clear (publications, degrees awarded, patents, etc...).
That sounds like a pretty good deal, but it turns out the Copenhagen Consensus website says micronutrients are the best investment, so maybe Wikipedia's information is old.
In the hypothetical that I had serious money to donate, I would of course try to evaluate effectiveness of the charities. Hopefully I could find the exception to "most".
AIDS is not curable, just preventable. If on the other hard we worked on malaria and TB we would prevent closer to 1 billion infections!
And malaria and TB are curable, and malaria causes anemia which makes people tired and less productive, and the cure is considerably cheaper than AIDS prevention.
I (cynically) think that the reason people are focused on AIDS is that the donor countries are worried about it, but they are not worried about malaria and TB. People donate for causes that are close to them, so it's not so cynical for an individual, but I think governments should be instructed by utility - but they are not.
TB can almost always be cured in healthy adults. The point being - even if you rescue 10 million people form dying from TB - 10 million would probably die of something else.
The best focus for anti-AIDS programs is probably things such as mother to child prevention (i.e. preventing an unborn baby from contracting AIDS from his mother, and providing formula milk to new mothers). The effects of this is measurable.
That said, I'm aware that givewell.org rates charities for their effectiveness. Their top-rated charity is Population Services International, which works on - among other things - preventing AIDS and malaria. "We estimate that it costs PSI $650-$1000 to prevent a case of HIV/AIDS and $500-$2500 to prevent a death from malaria; across the organization, we estimate that it costs PSI about $650-$1000 to save a life." http://www.givewell.net/PSI
If GiveWell's figures are accurate, it seems that $650-$1000 is what it should take to save a life. $27 billion to prevent 30 million infections sounds about right. If you have a cheaper way to save lives, I'd love to hear about it.