Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post May 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Cuts to US government foreign assistance have created unprecedented challenges for global health programs. Countries that have relied on this funding must now navigate substantial gaps and make difficult decisions about program priorities.
In the fourth episode of GiveWell's podcast series on these cuts, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Dan Brown about grants to create technical support units (TSUs) in six African countries. These TSUs will provide support to the ministries of health in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia as they navigate funding transitions to maintain essential health services. The work is being led by the respective governments, and the support will be tailored to their individual priorities, as well as the work they have already done.
The post Podcast Episode 4: Supporting Governments Navigating US Funding Cuts appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
The US government has historically spent approximately $12 billion to $15 billion annually in foreign assistance dedicated to global health. The funding cuts announced in the first few months of 2025 disrupted the global health landscape and created the possibility of enormous funding gaps that are still coming into focus. In response, GiveWell has approved around $18 million in grants to support urgent needs—but why has our research led us not to grant more funds yet?
In today's episode, the third in our series examining the impact of these cuts, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld is joined by Director of Research Teryn Mattox to explore this question. Building on our previous conversations about program disruptions and emergency responses, they dive into the nuanced reality of the current funding landscape and GiveWell's evidence-based approach to grantmaking during uncertainty.
The post Podcast Episode 3: Making Cost-Effective Grants Amid Uncertainty appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Recent cuts to US government foreign assistance have destabilized global health programs, impacting some of the most cost-effective interventions we've found. To address this situation, GiveWell is balancing a targeted, near-term response to urgent needs with a broad, long-term perspective of needs that may emerge. You can read about both on our recently launched webpage that shares some of the ways we're responding and the grants we're making.
Today, we're releasing the second podcast episode in a series of conversations with our research team that shares timely snapshots of this rapidly evolving situation.
Our first episode shared a broad overview of the impacts of US government aid cuts and GiveWell's initial response. This time, GiveWell Program Officer Natalie Crispin joins CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld to zoom in on a specific case, focusing on grants we've made to support urgent funding gaps for seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC).
The post Podcast Episode 2: Addressing Urgent Needs in Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post March 2025 Open Thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Recent US government funding cuts represent a significant shift in the global health funding landscape. The US has historically provided roughly 20% to 25% ($12 billion to $15 billion) of total global health assistance, and the administration has discussed potentially reducing that funding by 35% to 90% (though long-term effects remain uncertain and exact numbers remain difficult to ascertain). As a result, we're seeing substantial disruption to global health programs.
Our research team has pivoted to address this situation, which is now a major focus. It is creating urgent, short-term gaps and impacting some of the most cost-effective interventions we've found for saving and improving lives—such as malaria nets, malaria chemoprevention, and community-based management of acute malnutrition.
We've created a webpage to provide an overview of how we're responding, and we've started to record a series of conversations with our research team that shares timely snapshots of this rapidly evolving situation.
The post First Podcast Episode: GiveWell’s Response to USAID Funding Cuts appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post February 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Recently, the GiveWell research team has focused on collecting more feedback about our work and processes, such as through our Change Our Mind contest, our Research Council, and by asking donors for feedback. While we typically ask for candid, live feedback from the organizations we work with, we had not previously invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process. We know our processes are different from those of many other funders, and we want to make sure our work reflects our values of maximizing global well-being, transparency, truth-seeking, and considerateness.
So, in July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. The survey was sent to 55 individuals representing 40 organizations that participated in a GiveWell grant investigation from January 1, 2022, to March 31, 2024. It focused on their experiences with our process and post-grant follow-up, and also included a few general questions asking for their feedback about GiveWell. We received 32 responses to the survey, a response rate of 58%. Two of the 32 responses were from organizations that did not receive a grant.
What we learnedOverall, the people who responded to our survey rated their satisfaction with GiveWell’s investigation process as 4.2 out of 5. The highest-rated areas were responsiveness and respectful communication, well-reasoned information requests, and satisfaction with the post-investigation process.
The post Results from GiveWell’s First Grantee Survey appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post January 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Water quality is a significant area of grantmaking for GiveWell. Since 2022, we’ve directed around $120 million to water quality interventions, including a $65 million grant in 2022 to support Evidence Action’s chlorine dispenser program in Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi, and a $39 million grant in 2023 to support Evidence Action’s work assisting the scale up of in-line chlorination in two states in India.
We think that chlorination programs like these are likely to be highly cost-effective because chlorine is cheap, and based on our research, we think it can have a substantial impact in reducing child mortality.
In June, we wrote about our current plans for our water grantmaking portfolio. As we mentioned then, one of our highest-priority goals is to expand the number of implementers of large-scale chlorination programs. This is because our current grantmaking relies heavily on Evidence Action, which does not operate in some of the places where we think chlorination could look most cost-effective, such as parts of Francophone Africa.
Towards this goal, we are launching a public request for information (RFI) to identify organizations who would be interested in implementing chlorination programs in our highest-priority countries.
The post GiveWell Is Looking to Fund Pilots of Water Chlorination Programs appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
GiveWell’s cross-cutting team works to improve GiveWell’s grantmaking by tackling complex research questions that cut across grantmaking areas, reviewing our research and grants, and ensuring transparency and legibility in our findings. This post explains more about our role, how we think the work we do helps GiveWell’s grantmaking, and our current areas of focus.
What does the cross-cutting team do?The GiveWell research team’s goal is to find and fund the most cost-effective giving opportunities in global health and development. While our grantmaking teams are focused on funding programs in their specific areas (malaria, vaccines, nutrition, water, livelihoods, and new areas), the cross-cutting team addresses research questions that span across different areas of our work.
We do this in a few ways:
The post Research Strategy: Cross-Cutting appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
GiveWell is dedicated to finding outstanding giving opportunities and publishing the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give. The table below describes our financial performance in 2022 and 2023.
The post GiveWell’s Fundraising and Grantmaking in 2023 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
For this post, a number of GiveWell staff members volunteered to share the thinking behind their personal donations for the year. We’ve published similar posts in previous years. Staff are listed alphabetically by first name.
You can click the links to jump to a staff member’s entry: Araceli Steger, Calum Richards, Chandler Brotak, Dilhan Perera, Elie Hassenfeld, Erin Crossett, Julie Faller, Lauren Imholte, Maggie Lloydhauser, Natalie Crispin, Paige Henchen, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie, Steph Stojanovic, Teryn Mattox.
The post Staff Members’ Personal Donations for Giving Season 2024 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.
The post November 2024 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Our goal with hosting quarterly open threads is to give blog readers an opportunity to publicly raise comments or questions about GiveWell or related topics (in the comments section below). As always, you’re also welcome to email us at info@givewell.org or to request a call with GiveWell staff if you have feedback or questions you’d prefer to discuss privately. We’ll try to respond promptly to questions or comments.
You can view previous open threads here.
The post December 2024 Open Thread appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
Our three Giving Funds—all of which focus on maximizing the impact of your gift—were designed for donors with different preferences, and we encourage you to donate to the one that makes the most sense for you:
We think donors can do a huge amount of good by supporting these funds. The rest of this post describes some of the work that donations to these funds have enabled over the past year.
The post GiveWell’s 2024 Giving Recommendations appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
GiveWell aims to save and improve lives as cost-effectively as possible. That mission has an urgency, and we put a lot of effort into finding and funding high-impact giving opportunities quickly. But we also want to maximize our impact over time, and have found that high-impact interventions can take years of investment to discover, vet, launch, and scale.
As a result, we’ve begun to deploy funds across a longer time period in order to (a) avoid a scenario where we want to make cost-effective grants but can’t due to lack of funds, (b) aid long-term planning for our research team, and (c) communicate consistent expectations to grantees and potential grantees about our cost-effectiveness threshold.
Specifically, we previously aimed to allocate all funds within the same year they were raised, targeting a year-end balance of zero. Now, we plan to enter each year with sufficient funds to fully cover our grantmaking activities for that year without accounting for new donations.This approach creates greater financial stability, which we think will allow us to plan better and to achieve greater impact over time.
If you donate to our Top Charities Fund (TCF), nothing has changed. We still expect to commit TCF donations in the quarter after they are received. These changes will only apply to our unrestricted and All Grants Fund (AGF).
The post An Update to GiveWell’s Grant Deployment Timelines appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
This year, we re-evaluated the cost effectiveness of direct cash transfers as implemented by our friends at GiveDirectly. Our complete writeup is here, and full of fascinating details, but the main headline is: we now estimate that GiveDirectly’s flagship cash program is 3 to 4 times more cost-effective than we'd previously estimated.
It is important to note two things: (1) this won’t alter our Top Charities list or our grantmaking—we believe that the programs we currently direct funding to are at least twice as cost-effective as this new estimate, so we don’t expect to support GiveDirectly’s flagship program in the near term; and (2) this update is the result of re-evaluating the evidence underpinning GiveDirectly’s program, which we hadn’t formally done since 2019—the structure of GiveDirectly’s program has not changed (though they are now carrying it out in more locations since our last evaluation).
We share more information about our research below. You can read our full, detailed report here. You can read GiveDirectly’s blog post on our re-evaluation here.
The post Re-evaluating the Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
From sports announcers to political pundits to friends gossipping about romantic interests, lots of people make probabilistic predictions about the future. But only some actually follow up to see how well their predictions performed. For instance, you may have heard that weather forecasters predicted that the 2024 hurricane season had an 85% chance of being more active than normal and there would be 17 to 25 named storms. But in September, they were surprised that so far, it had been unexpectedly quiet, with climate change likely affecting weather patterns in ways scientists don’t fully understand.
GiveWell researchers often make forecasts about activities, milestones, and outcomes of the programs and research studies we recommend funding for, as well as decisions that GiveWell will make in the future. For example, we might forecast whether we’ll fund more hospital programs to implement Kangaroo Mother Care programs by 2027, or whether data collected about how many people are using chlorinated water will align with our expectations.
As a way to solicit external feedback on some of our predictions, we just launched a page on Metaculus, an online forecasting platform. Periodically, we will post forecasts there about GiveWell’s research and grants for the public to make their own predictions. Metaculus and other contributors will award $2,250 in prizes to people who leave insightful comments on a select group of forecasting questions. The deadline for comments is December 1, 2024.
The post Making Predictions about Our Grants appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
There’s a common piece of dating advice: before you commit, go on a big trip together. Hopefully the trip itself will be fun, but that’s (almost) beside the point: the real goal is to figure out how smoothly you solve problems together. When it starts raining at 10pm on a Friday and you’re caught outdoors because of a misread-map incident (if we’re being honest: entirely your fault), you’re going to learn a lot about whether your partner reacts to difficulties in a way you’d like to be around for the rest of your life.
The value of what you learn from the trip (a concept called “value of information,” or VOI) can far exceed the direct costs and benefits, because the trip is just for a week and the rest of your life is, well, the rest of your life. If there’s a 10% chance that the trip will show you that you’re not truly compatible, the expected value of that information is higher than any plausible level of (un)happiness you might experience on the trip itself.
Sometimes, the value of information makes the trip worth taking when it wouldn’t have been otherwise—your partner has already scheduled a trip during their time off and it’s very inconvenient for you to join them, but the value of information makes the trip worth it. Other times, you can make choices about the trip in order to increase the value of information you’ll receive: perhaps an all-inclusive beach resort would be more enjoyable today, but a road trip where you camp at different spots each night has a higher value of information and so is ultimately more valuable.
The post How Do You Value Information? appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.
