The Givewell Blog All Categories (update page version)

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

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!

Read More

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.

Clubfoot, a congenital condition where children are born with one or both feet twisted inward, affects roughly one in 800 newborns globally. Most of those cases are in low- and middle-income countries, where only about 20% of children with clubfoot receive treatment. While most donations to GiveWell are directed to programs that reduce child mortality, our growing research capacity over the last several years has expanded what we’re able to evaluate and fund. One outcome of that work is that we’re better able to direct donations to highly cost-effective programs addressing disabling conditions, like clubfoot, and meaningfully improve quality of life.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Meika Ball about GiveWell’s grant to MiracleFeet, an organization that expands access to clubfoot treatment. Their conversation walks through MiracleFeet’s program, how we estimated its cost-effectiveness, and Meika’s recent site visit to see the program in action in Côte d’Ivoire.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 28: Evaluating and Funding a New Kind of Grant (Clubfoot Treatment) appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Vitamin A supplementation is one of the programs GiveWell has supported the longest, and we’re currently funding it in many African countries. The program has an unusually strong evidence base for reducing child mortality, with multiple randomized controlled trials. Yet, as is the case for most global health programs, the evidence for vitamin A supplementation has complex, unresolved questions, such as how well findings from decades-old trials apply today and the extent to which existing research has been influenced by publication bias. As GiveWell’s research team has grown over the last several years, we have expanded our capacity to carefully research these questions.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher Stephan Guyenet about the evidence base for vitamin A supplementation, the complications in applying that evidence to our funding decisions, and how GiveWell has improved our cost-effectiveness estimates for the program.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 27: Scrutinizing One of Our Longest-Funded 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 March 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell’s primary focus has always been researching, identifying, and directing donations to programs we believe will do the most good. When GiveWell first started, we approached this by looking for organizations that were already delivering highly cost-effective, evidence-backed programs and directing funding to those programs. Over time, we were able to focus further upstream by first identifying highly cost-effective programs and then supporting the development of organizations to deliver them.

We’ve been able to take an even more expansive view as our research team doubled in size over the last several years. In addition to our core grantmaking, we’re now funding an increased number of grants designed to provide information that we think will help us direct more funding to highly cost-effective programs in the future. This includes things like generating research about program effectiveness, scoping new promising programs, and piloting program variations.

GiveWell has long made some grants aimed at improving our knowledge base, but this work has now grown substantially and become more systematic. In 2025, GiveWell made 18 grants, totaling approximately $39 million, that were aimed specifically at getting more information to improve future funding decisions. In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Julie Faller about these “value of information” grants.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 26: Investing in Information for Greater Future Impact appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Over the past several years, GiveWell has been focused on growing, deepening, and improving our research team’s work in line with our core values of truth-seeking and transparency. As part of that effort, we’ve invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process in order to learn and improve.

In July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. 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. The survey sought to better understand the extent to which we live out our values in our interactions with external organizations. The questions focused on organizations’ experiences with our grant investigation process and post-grant follow-up.

In 2025, we repeated the process with the same survey instrument and compared results to the prior year, to see what had changed and whether our daily work is reflecting our core values and operating principles.

GiveWell’s second annual grant investigation survey was sent to organizations that participated in our grant investigation process from April 2024 through July 2025. We invited a total of 122 individuals representing 75 organizations to participate, and we received 80 responses (66% response rate). Included in the total were 22 contacts from investigations that did not result in a grant, from which we received five responses.

Read More

The post GiveWell’s 2025 Grant Investigation Survey Results appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell aims to find and fund programs that will do the most good per dollar. To do this, we carefully evaluate potential grants before making them—assessing academic evidence, building cost-effectiveness models, and talking to people in the sector who know the program well.

But our work doesn’t stop there. When a program we’ve supported nears the end of their funding, we also regularly evaluate its results to decide whether to continue our support. This typically involves gathering and analyzing extensive monitoring data. In most cases, the results are consistent with what we expected, and we renew the programs’ support. But sometimes we decide that, even if a program is doing a lot of good, it may not be having the impact we expected. In that case, we decide not to renew our support and instead direct those funds to where we think they’ll do much more good for people in need.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett about the research that led GiveWell not to renew support for Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water—a program that installs chlorine dispensers at rural water points so that households can treat their drinking water and reduce waterborne disease—in Malawi and Uganda.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 25: Following the Data on Dispensers for Safe Water 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 February 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell is launching two new requests for information (RFI) to expand GiveWell’s funding for vaccination outreach and anemia control programs. We’re excited to replicate the success of last year’s water chlorination RFI and explore how to reach even more people in low- and middle-income countries with programs to save and improve lives.

The first RFI seeks organizations that would like to implement targeted vaccination outreach or mobile vaccination programs in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, or Somalia. The second seeks programs that reduce iron deficiency anemia through large-scale food fortification, targeted iron supplementation, and iron biofortification in Africa.

These RFIs are just one component of our expanding efforts to find and fund high-impact ways to help people in need. We’re making them public in an effort to reach as many organizations as possible, and we encourage you to share them with your networks. Submissions for both RFIs are due March 27.

Read More

The post GiveWell Launches RFIs for Targeted Vaccination Outreach in Three Countries and Anemia Control Programs in Africa appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

In our 2025 grantmaking year, GiveWell approved $418 million in grants to highly cost-effective programs in order to save and improve lives as much as we can. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find. Last year’s grantmaking reflects this growth, and we will be continuing an intensive effort this year to scale our ability to partner with donors to help people in need.

Between February 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, GiveWell approved 131 grants to 69 organizations—the most grants we’ve made in a year so far. This post provides an overview of the kinds of grants we made and the impact we had last year. This was only possible thanks to the generosity of our donors. We’re incredibly grateful for the trust you place in our research and for your partnership in trying to do the most good we can together.

In 2025, we launched more than 200 formal grant investigations, after reviewing many additional promising opportunities. Tens of thousands of hours went into this research, which resulted in 131 approved grants. This is more than double the number of grants we approved during 2024, and resulted in a year-over-year increase of more than 20% in total grantmaking dollars.

Read More

The post GiveWell’s 2025 Grantmaking: Record Grants, Expanded Reach, Crisis Response appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing deadly diseases, and, while global needs for them are great, vaccines already receive substantial global funding. This creates a challenge: How do you identify opportunities where additional funding can meaningfully increase vaccination rates and save lives?

GiveWell has long recognized the potential for highly cost-effective vaccine programs. We started supporting vaccination programs in 2015 and have made over $200 million in vaccination-related grants to date. For example, New Incentives, one of our Top Charities, aims to increase routine childhood vaccinations in northern Nigeria by providing small cash incentives to caregivers who bring their children into clinics for vaccinations.

Over the past several years, we’ve been growing our research team and laying the groundwork to expand the scope of our work and funding.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Natalie Crispin, who leads GiveWell’s vaccination grantmaking. They discuss how our research approach has evolved and what it means for helping more children access life-saving vaccinations.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 24: Testing New Strategies to Increase Vaccination Coverage appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC)—a program that provides preventive antimalarial medication to young children during the months when malaria is mostly likely to be transmitted—is one of the most cost-effective programs GiveWell has identified. Malaria Consortium’s SMC program has been one of our Top Charities since 2016, and we’ve recommended more than $500 million in grants to the program.

Most of our funding to date has supported programs in West Africa, where strong evidence gives us confidence in the effectiveness of the drug combination used. In eastern and southern Africa, malaria chemoprevention programs could potentially help many more children, but we have substantial uncertainties about drug effectiveness in that region.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher John Macke about the CHAMP trial, a randomized controlled trial of chemoprevention drugs we’re supporting in Malawi, and how it could shape our malaria grantmaking.

This research is one example of how GiveWell is building for the future: investing in research now that could substantially expand our ability to direct funding cost-effectively in the years ahead.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 23: Generating Evidence for the Future of Malaria Prevention 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 January 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell is often thought of for its Top Charities, but over the last several years, we’ve been substantially broadening our work. We’ve developed new ways to identify potential grantees, funded research to fill gaps in our understanding, and explored new program areas where we believe cost-effective opportunities exist but other funders aren’t investing. This increased breadth isn’t a goal in itself—we’ve been laying the groundwork to deliver more impact, now and in the future.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about how our research approach has evolved and what it means for the future of our grantmaking.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 22: Evolving Our Research Approach for Greater Impact appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell has built its reputation on rigorous research—analyzing randomized controlled trials, building cost-effectiveness models, and reviewing monitoring data to identify cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives. In an effort to supplement this desk research and make better decisions, we’ve been working to gather more information directly from the people who live and work in the countries where we fund programs.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Principal Researcher Alex Cohen about GiveWell’s work to gather local insights to check our assumptions and figure out what we might be missing.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 21: Testing Our Assumptions through Local Insights appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Global health programs faced major disruptions to their funding in 2025. Back in March, we published our first podcast episode to share a timely snapshot of the immediate impacts caused by the foreign aid freeze and GiveWell’s initial response strategy. It was unclear whether and when funding would resume, and what the medium and long-term implications would be for life-saving programs.

Over the last year, GiveWell has drawn on almost two decades of cost-effectiveness research and analysis to assess the effects of this tumult in real time, identify gaps where funding could have exceptional impact, and prepare for future needs. We’ve made nearly $50 million in grants in direct response to funding cuts, as part of our expected total grantmaking of around $350 million for the year.

In our final episode of the year, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Director of Research Teryn Maddox follow-up on their first podcast conversation to look back at GiveWell’s response: Where did we succeed? What did we get wrong? Where could we have done better? How did our response evolve? And what might all of this mean for the world and our work in 2026?

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 20: Taking Lessons from a Year of Aid Cuts into 2026 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 December 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.