The Givewell Blog All Categories (update page version)

Thanks to the trust and generosity of our donors, GiveWell raised $616 million in metrics year 2025, an increase of 49% from 2024. We directed $427 million to support outstanding opportunities to do good in 32 countries. We estimate that the programs supported by the funds we directed this year will save an additional 86,000 lives.

We have spent years growing our research capacity and scope to enable us to direct significantly more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find, and 2025 was a milestone in that ongoing growth. We responded to urgent needs generated by foreign aid cuts, and we continued to find and fund a growing number and a wider range of high-impact ways to help people. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion in 2026, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale.

And yet, global needs still far exceed available resources. More than four million young children die in low- and middle-income countries every year—and most of those deaths are preventable. As our team works toward our goal of helping people at a much larger scale, we’re grateful to the donors whose support enables us to continue to find and fund highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most.

See our full 2025 metrics report for more details behind the money we raised, the funds we directed, operational expenses, donor metrics, and the impact we had last year.

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The post GiveWell’s 2025 Metrics and Impact 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.

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The post August 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Malaria kills around 600,000 people annually. Children under five years old in Africa account for about 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide, and around 11% of total malaria deaths are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

As part of our ongoing efforts to scale our research and funding to direct much more money where it can do extraordinary good, GiveWell recently made its largest grant ever: $276 million to fund the purchase and distribution of malaria nets in DRC through the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). The grant is being funded by Coefficient Giving and donations to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund.

We estimate this grant will lead to the distribution of around 92 million insecticide-treated nets (ITNs), 46 million of which we think would not otherwise be distributed, and will avert approximately 67,000 deaths.

The research we conducted as part of this grant investigation led us to two key decisions:

• First, this grant is much larger than our past funding for nets in DRC, enabling the purchase of nets for use across all 26 provinces of DRC from 2027 through 2029 and covering $60 million in distribution costs.
• Second, the funding will shorten the time between regular net distributions to provide additional protection against malaria in up to five provinces with higher malaria burden.

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The post The Research behind Our $276 Million Grant for Malaria Nets in DRC appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell, with co-funding from Coefficient Giving, recently made our largest grant ever: $276 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) to support the procurement and distribution of 92 million nets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from 2027 through 2029. We estimate that the nets, 46 million of which we think are additional to what would otherwise be distributed, will avert roughly 67,000 deaths. We have supported AMF’s work for more than 15 years, and the insecticide-treated nets it procures and distributes remain one of the most cost-effective ways we've found to save lives.

This grant, which involved a more rigorous investigation process than most, is part of a larger story about scaling our team and systems to handle substantially more funding while deepening our research rigor. Last year, we directed more than $400 million to highly cost-effective programs to save and improve lives and, this year, we expect our grantmaking to approach, and possibly exceed, $1 billion. This increase in grantmaking aims to meet global needs faster and more effectively.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Alex Bowles about the questions the team set out to answer during the grant investigation.

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The post Announcing Our Largest Grant to Date appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

When GiveWell investigates a new cause area, we’re often focused on two priorities: directing funding where we think it can help people most and generating evidence to inform larger investments later. Family planning is a clear example. Recent foreign aid cuts—including reductions from the US, UK, and Dutch governments—deepened an already substantial need and opened up new cost-effective funding opportunities.

When we published our last podcast episode on family planning, GiveWell had made only a couple of small grants. Since then, we’ve made a number of additional grants totaling around $20 million, exemplifying how our growing research capacity and expertise enable us to expand into new areas. By doing so, we aim to move more donor funding faster to global health programs where it can do extraordinary good.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera about the family planning programming we’ve funded over the past year, how we’ve structured our grant portfolio, and what we’re hoping to learn.

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The post Finding the Bottlenecks in Family Planning Access 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.

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The post July 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death for children under five, killing more than 400,000 children every year. GiveWell has funded several programs to prevent and treat diarrhea, and we recently expanded our work by making a grant to support the implementation and evaluation of WASHmobile in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. The program, which was developed by Johns Hopkins University, delivers water treatment supplies and hygiene messaging to households at the highest risk of diarrheal disease. It has shown promising results in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) but hasn’t yet been implemented at scale in the challenging settings where the need is greatest.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett, who leads GiveWell’s water research subteam, about the grant. They discuss how the program works, what prior research tells us about its potential, the significant uncertainties involved, and what GiveWell expects to learn.

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The post Tackling Diarrheal Disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This year, we are focused on two primary goals. The first is to rapidly scale our research capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the near future. The second is to find and fund as many of the best opportunities we can this year to save and improve lives.

In 2025, we committed $418 million in grants. Though we’re just halfway through the year, we’ve already committed over $400 million in 2026. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale.

We’re excited to share another major step in that direction. Coefficient Giving has decided to increase its near-term funding commitment for GiveWell grants to $1 billion in support of our continued scaling.

This commitment is both extraordinary and timely. Near-term needs continue to far surpass our fundraising expectations, and we are actively working to raise more funds to support a growing set of cost-effective opportunities to help people in need.

Several factors have driven our current expansion, as well as our ability to continue scaling.

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The post Scaling Our Impact, with Support from a $1 Billion Commitment appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell tends to be known for its work in areas like malaria prevention, water treatment, and nutrition. But as our research team has grown, so has our ability to search for cost-effective programs across a much wider range of issues.

Serious health problems, such as lack of medical oxygen and stockouts of essential medicines at health facilities, affect millions of people in low-income countries. There may be highly cost-effective solutions to these problems that haven’t been thoroughly evaluated or adequately funded. One of the ways GiveWell is searching for these solutions is through the new areas research subteam, which is responsible for investigating programs in cause areas GiveWell hasn’t historically focused on.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dan Brown about GiveWell’s new areas research subteam and three grants that illustrate the team’s work.

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The post Casting a Wider Net for Cost-Effective Programs 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.

Read More

The post June 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell’s latest webinar took a close look at a critical step in our research process: how we’re working to evaluate past grants to understand what happened, why, and how we can use what we learn to improve our grantmaking over time.

Our research spans the full lifecycle of grants. Before we approve funding for a grant, our research team reviews academic evidence, builds cost-effectiveness models, and consults with experts to estimate the program’s expected impact. When programs near the end of their funding, we investigate whether a grant achieved the impact we initially projected. In 2025, our growing research capacity enabled us to expand this final step for select grants and publish comprehensive evaluations that we call “lookbacks.”

During the webinar, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld moderated a discussion with Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller and Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury. They covered four examples of grant lookbacks—discussing what we’ve learned and how these lessons are informing our work—and answered questions from the audience live.

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The post Looking Back to Give Better: A Webinar Recap appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

In September 2025, we created a livelihoods research subteam to specifically focus on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. While we have evaluated and funded livelihoods programs throughout GiveWell’s history, we now have a dedicated program officer overseeing this portfolio, which has allowed us to build on and deepen that work.

Historically, GiveWell has predominantly focused on health-related programs. Diseases like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia can be prevented fairly cheaply, and the evidence for health programs is often strong relative to other areas. As our research team has grown, we’ve been building capacity to explore programs that increase people’s incomes, where the long-term impact is often more challenging to measure and effectiveness differs from context to context.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury about GiveWell’s expanding work on livelihoods programs, which programs might be the most cost-effective, and research we’re funding to help answer some key questions.

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The post Expanding Our Search for Cost-Effective Ways to Reduce Poverty appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Despite significant progress fighting malaria over the past few decades, the disease still kills around 600,000 people annually. Malaria is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide.

While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team are allowing us to take on this challenge now in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago.

Over our nineteen-year history, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion in donations to malaria prevention programs that we estimate will save more than 235,000 lives. This is primarily through two core programs:

• Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which provides preventive antimalarial medication to young children during the months when malaria is mostly likely to be transmitted. We have directed more than $500 million to support SMC, most via Malaria Consortium’s SMC program, one of our Top Charities.
• Insecticide-treated nets, which are typically hung over beds or other sleeping spaces to provide protection from mosquitoes at night. We have directed more than $600 million to support net campaigns, most via Against Malaria Foundation, another of our Top Charities.

GiveWell’s overall research team has doubled in size over the past few years. Our malaria research team is the largest of our research teams, with 15 people collectively devoting more than 20,000 hours each year to our expanded efforts.

With this growth, we are working to reduce malaria deaths even further by (1) funding evidence to improve our future grantmaking decisions for core malaria prevention programs, (2) identifying ways to increase coverage of our core programs, and (3) expanding our portfolio beyond our core programs.

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The post Growing GiveWell’s Largest Research Area: Malaria appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell has granted $5 million to the DIV Fund to identify and support promising water quality and access innovations. Our grant aims to build a pipeline of high-potential, cost-effective opportunities that GiveWell could consider for future funding. If you’re working on piloting or testing an early-stage water intervention, or know someone who is, please apply to the DIV Fund’s newly launched request for proposals (RFP) or share it with your network. Applications are now open and are being accepted on a rolling basis.

Unsafe water results in more than 750,000 deaths each year, most of them in Africa and Asia. Though water is a newer cause area at GiveWell, we’ve directed more than $150 million to water quality interventions since 2022. As our research capacity continues to grow, so does our ability to explore new opportunities and types of grants to prevent deaths through safe water access.

We encourage organizations with water quality and access projects to apply to the DIV Fund, which we hope will surface promising programs that we can evaluate for future funding. We are particularly interested in water quality programs, as we believe this is where donors’ contributions can save and improve lives the most.

GiveWell has historically focused its water funding on chlorination programs, and we remain confident that these are among the most cost-effective water interventions available. We also hope this support to the DIV Fund helps reveal a wider breadth of high-impact water opportunities where we can direct donations.

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The post Building our Safe Water Grantmaking: Apply to the DIV Fund’s RFP 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.

Read More

The post May 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Anemia, which is commonly caused by iron deficiency, can cause fatigue, cognitive impairment, and complications during pregnancy—and it affects roughly a quarter of the world’s population. Over the last decade, GiveWell has directed nearly $50 million to programs to address this health issue.

Because of the large number of people affected and the low cost to provide people with iron, we are evaluating additional iron fortification and supplementation programs to potentially increase our grantmaking in this area. At the same time, it has been difficult to determine exactly how much providing people with additional iron improves their lives. GiveWell’s growing research capacity is allowing us to study the programs we’ve funded and to support new research, then to use what we learn to continue improving our funding decisions.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Researcher Andrew Martin about GiveWell’s work on iron: why the evidence is more complicated than it might seem, what we’ve learned from years of funding iron programs, and what’s ahead.

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The post Podcast Episode 30: What a Decade of Iron Funding Has Taught Us appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to rapidly scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the near future. The second is to grant at least $500 million to the best opportunities we can find this year to save and improve lives.

Over the past several years, GiveWell has doubled the size of our research team to deepen and broaden our search for highly impactful programs. Our 60 researchers are now distributed among 11 subteams that cover a number of global health and development cause areas, as well as core research needs.

Below you’ll find a summary of the key approaches each subteam is using this year to find new opportunities to help people in need as much as we can.

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The post How We’re Searching for the Best Ways to Help in 2026 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell’s research doesn’t end once we’ve made a grant. We evaluate a subset of completed grants, comparing what we thought would happen to what actually took place, then try to use what we learn to improve our future funding decisions. Over the past year, we’ve formalized and expanded this work, publishing comprehensive “lookbacks” for select grants.

A recent lookback on grants GiveWell made to fund insecticide-treated net distributions supported by the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) illustrates the growing capacity of GiveWell’s research team. We drew on multiple independent data sources, funded qualitative interviews to gather more information, and conducted a novel empirical analysis to deepen our confidence.

In this episode, based on a conversation originally aired on GiveWell’s internal podcast for staff*, GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld provides additional context while GiveWell’s Chief Research and Program Officer Teryn Mattox dives deep into the details with Program Director Alex Cohen and Researcher Steven Brownstone, examining how we conducted the lookback, what we found, and how what we learned may shape our future nets grantmaking.

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The post Podcast Episode 29: Behind the Analysis — Assessing Past Malaria Nets Grants appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell is launching a new request for information (RFI) to expand and strengthen our malaria grantmaking in Africa and help our donors make a greater impact. Expressions of interest can be submitted through one of two tracks, the first for malaria chemoprevention and vector control pilot programs and the second for research and evaluation. Submissions are due June 24.

Malaria kills around 600,000 people annually, mostly children under five in Africa. To date, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion in donations to malaria prevention programs. As our research capacity grows, this RFI aims to pilot promising malaria prevention strategies and generate evidence to address a range of questions in malaria prevention and epidemiology.

We’d like to reach as many organizations as possible—please share with your network and consider applying!

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The post GiveWell Opens RFI for Malaria Pilots and Research 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.

Read More

The post April 2026 Update appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.