All Categories Blogs

On December 4, 2025, we held a panel discussion titled “Growing Needs, Shrinking Aid: Cost-Effective Action in a Year of Funding Cuts.” The discussion, which was moderated by GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld, addressed the effects of recent cuts, how GiveWell is responding, and what we’re learning along the way—including our predictions and uncertainties about the future. GiveWell researchers Alex Bowles, Dilhan Perera, Meika Ball, and Rosie Bettle answered questions and shared their latest insights. Watch the video or read the transcript.

Because of limited time, we were unable to answer all of the questions live. Below we’ve answered some of the questions that weren’t addressed during the webinar, along with some additional questions submitted by audience members, focusing on four themes:

• The challenges of an uncertain future
• Taking action in the face of uncertainty
• The role of cost-effectiveness
• Future GiveWell grantmaking

Read More

The post Growing Needs, Shrinking Aid: Answering More of Your Questions appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This episode follows up on the November 26, 2025 episode of Planet Money, "Saving lives with fewer dollars," which covered GiveWell's evaluation of a grant to the Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA) to maintain primary healthcare, hospital services, and malnutrition treatment in two subdistricts of North Cameroon following unexpected aid cuts earlier this year. We recommend listening to the Planet Money episode first, as it provides important context.

Significant changes to foreign aid this year created challenges for implementing organizations—and for funders evaluating which programs to support with limited resources. The Planet Money team followed along as we assessed the effects of the cuts in real time, focusing on our evaluation of a potential grant to ALIMA to maintain nutrition and primary healthcare services in Cameroon.

Following the announcement of the US government's stop-work order and funding freeze in January, we created a rapid response research team and began assessing opportunities we thought were potentially highly cost effective. In March, we launched an investigation of the $1.9 million ALIMA grant, which we funded in June based on the team's findings.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld dives deeper into the grant investigation with Program Officers Rosie Bettle and Alice Redfern, discussing the timeline, modeling approach, and what ultimately led us to make the grant.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 18: Behind the Planet Money ALIMA Grant Story 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 November 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

It has been a tumultuous year for global health. In early 2025, the US government cut billions of dollars in foreign aid, affecting millions of people around the world and creating substantial uncertainty that continues to ripple through health and development programs around the world.

Drawing on almost two decades of cost-effectiveness research and analysis, GiveWell assessed the effects in real time and identified funding gaps where donors’ contributions could have exceptional impact. Our actions were guided by our core principles:

• Search for highly cost-effective giving opportunities, even in uncertain circumstances.
• Rigorously evaluate those opportunities and share our research publicly, while acknowledging that timely action sometimes requires accepting higher uncertainty.
• Direct funds to where we think they'll do the most good, considering both immediate needs and long-term implications.

In response to funding shortfalls, we funded time-sensitive opportunities to ensure that cost-effective programs could continue. And in response to substantial uncertainty and in expectation of growing needs, we engaged in efforts to research new areas and prepare ourselves for the future. You can read some examples of our response later in this post.

Read More

The post Help Us Respond to an Uncertain Future for Global Health appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Despite significant progress over the past several decades, malaria remains a leading cause of death globally for children under five. This year’s cuts to foreign aid funding disrupted highly effective programs to prevent malaria, such as seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC).

SMC provides antimalarial medication to children under the age of five during the rainy season when malaria transmission is highest, reducing their risk of dying from the disease. Malaria Consortium’s SMC program, which is one of the most cost-effective programs our researchers have identified, has been one of GiveWell’s Top Charities since 2016, and we’ve recommended more than $500 million in grants for the program since that time.

SMC is only delivered during a specific period each year when malaria transmission is highest. The campaigns require careful planning and preparation on a specified timeline to ensure that the drugs are ready to distribute during that window. The funding freeze that started in January jeopardized 2025 SMC campaigns in several countries because of the disruption to funding for these time-sensitive pre-campaign activities.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Natalie Crispin about how GiveWell responded quickly and flexibly to ensure that SMC campaigns moved forward this year.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 17: Bridging an Uncertain Time for a Lifesaving Program 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 October 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Our Beyond the Spreadsheets podcast mini-series lets you ride along with our leadership team on their recent weeklong site visit to Malawi. Recorded daily during the trip, the series shares the behind-the-scenes experience of a GiveWell site visit through real-time reflections and clips of conversations.

At GiveWell, the vast majority of our work is desk-based research—analyzing evidence and modeling program outcomes. Site visits are a small part of what we do, but they add crucial on-the-ground context that raises important questions, challenges our assumptions, and makes our research stronger.

We had two main goals in visiting Malawi. First, we wanted to understand the effects of foreign aid cuts firsthand in a country that may be particularly hard hit. Second, we wanted to see livelihoods programs like GiveDirectly and Spark Microgrants in action, providing insight as we expand our focus on interventions that aim to increase people’s economic well-being.

Throughout the week, the team visited health clinics, schools, and local villages to speak with healthcare workers and community members who shared a glimpse into their lives. Listen to the episodes below to hear a candid, day-by-day account of our learning process and some of the new insights and questions that will inform our future research.

Read More

The post Beyond the Spreadsheets: Malawi Site Visit Podcast Series appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Clean water. Most of us take it for granted. We can turn on the tap and have safe water to drink whenever we want, without having to give it a second thought. That’s not the case for more than a billion people around the world who lack access to uncontaminated drinking water. This is a significant health concern: According to the World Health Organization, more than 500,000 people die each year from diseases caused by contaminated water.

We’ve been thinking hard about how best to build on our past grantmaking to address the huge need for clean water. In January, we launched a public request for information (RFI) to identify organizations who would be interested in implementing chlorination programs in countries with a high burden of waterborne disease.

RFIs are a relatively new strategy for GiveWell aimed at identifying highly cost-effective grantmaking opportunities. The call for water chlorination programs was just the second RFI we issued. The first, completed in 2024, was for research grants, and we’ve since completed another, for programs aimed at increasing vaccination rates. We’ve been excited about the overwhelming interest our RFIs have received. By the March 7 application deadline for water chlorination programs, we had received more than 200 applications. From that group, we recently funded a portfolio of grants totaling around $16 million to support pilots of in-line chlorination programs in six African countries.

Read More

The post Safe Water Projects: Saving Lives and Improving Our Grantmaking 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 September 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

As you may have heard on a recent episode of our podcast, we’re launching an experiment: focusing more attention on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. We are in the process of completing a search for a new program officer to lead an expanded livelihoods research team, and we plan to allocate up to $10 million for granting to cost-effective programs we find in the first year. Depending on the outcome of these efforts, we may hire additional researchers to focus on livelihoods.

GiveWell has historically directed most of its funding toward health interventions that avert death and disease, but those are not the only positive outcomes our grants target. We have long grappled with questions about how to value different positive impacts relative to each other. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially increase someone’s economic well-being? Our expanded research into programs that improve lives will help us better reflect the diversity of relevant perspectives on that question in our grantmaking.

Our standard moral weights—that is, the values we assign to different outcomes—assume that saving a life is about 100 times more valuable (depending on age) than doubling a person’s income for a year (see our recent blog post on moral weights to learn more). This assumption has meant income-focused programs have been less likely than health-focused programs to meet our cost-effectiveness threshold.

But our moral weights are a necessary tool, not an absolute truth. Some GiveWell donors and staff, as well as some of the people affected by the programs we fund, place a higher value on income-increasing programs. To account for this, we’ll be funding livelihoods programs that would appear as cost-effective as our standard recommendations to a donor who values income gains twice as much as our standard moral weights.

Read More

The post GiveWell Expands Work on Livelihoods Programs appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Foreign aid funding cuts are reshaping the global health landscape, creating urgent funding gaps and forcing difficult prioritization decisions across health systems worldwide. To understand the real-world effects, it's essential to hear from the organizations working on the front lines with government partners to navigate the funding crisis. The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) is a large global health nonprofit and an important GiveWell partner in this work.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with CHAI CEO Buddy Shah about how the aid cuts are affecting health programs and what it takes to build a strategic response. They discuss the hidden complexities of the funding landscape, the difficult choices governments are being forced to make, and what this pivotal moment could mean for the future of global health.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 11: A Frontline View of Foreign Aid Cuts with CHAI’s CEO 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 August 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell’s ability to find and fund highly cost-effective health programs relies on a foundation of credible data. A key source of that data, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), recently had its primary funding from USAID discontinued. This creates the potential of a significant challenge for GiveWell’s research—and for evidence-based grantmaking across the global health sector.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher Adam Salisbury to explore the implications of this funding gap. They discuss how the DHS program works, why it’s essential for informed decision-making, and how GiveWell is responding to the growing limitations of public health data.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 10: The Fragile Foundations of Global Health Data appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Thanks to the generosity of more than 30,000 donors, GiveWell raised $415 million and directed $397 million to cost-effective programs in metrics year 2024 (February 2024 to January 2025). We approved 55 grants to 34 organizations working in 22 countries. We estimate that the programs supported by these grants will help around 34 million people who would not otherwise have been reached and will save an additional 74,000 lives.

We’re incredibly grateful to our donors for the trust they place in our research and for their partnership in trying to do the most good we can together. See this blog post and our full 2024 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.

Read More

The post GiveWell’s 2024 Metrics and Impact appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

As GiveWell’s research team grows, our goal is to compare as wide a range of programs as we can to find the most cost-effective opportunities to help people. Over the past year and a half, we’ve been investigating family planning services that help people decide whether and when to have children as a new area of research.

Family planning programs have particularly complex challenges around targeting, logistics, and ensuring informed and voluntary choice. However, GiveWell's increasing research capacity positions us to now take on new and complex investigations like this. Over the past year, we’ve been  reviewing evidence, consulting with experts, modeling the benefits of contraception, and conducting initial grant investigations, focusing on programs that aim to increase access to and use of modern contraception. This work is especially timely as anticipated cuts to foreign assistance could reduce existing family planning support by around 50%, creating significant new funding gaps.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with researcher Dilhan Perera about the complexity of evaluating family planning programs. They explore the types of programs GiveWell is considering, the unique challenges this area presents, and key questions we’re working to answer.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 9: Advancing GiveWell’s Work on Family Planning 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 July 2025 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Malaria is the cause area where GiveWell has directed the most funding over our 18-year history. We’ve recommended over $1 billion to malaria programs, which we estimate will avert over 200,000 deaths, mostly in young children, through support for programs like Against Malaria Foundation’s insecticide-treated nets and Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention.

Despite significant progress against malaria in the past 25 years (reducing annual deaths from 900,000 to 600,000), malaria is still a leading cause of death globally for children under five. The current status of malaria prevention—and all the progress that’s been made—is now in a precarious position. Significant reductions in funding from key donors like the US President’s Malaria Initiative and the Global Fund are anticipated and threaten to create substantial new gaps in life-saving malaria programs.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Alex Bowles and Senior Researcher Rosie Bettle about the impacts these funding cuts could have. They offer a timely look at the uncertainty of the funding landscape, the life-saving malaria programs that are most at risk, and how GiveWell is leveraging its expertise to respond to emerging needs.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 8: Malaria Funding at a Crossroads appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Imagine you are planning to make a charitable donation and want your gift to make a real difference. You’ve done your research and found three very effective programs: one provides cash transfers to increase the incomes of very poor households; one provides treatment to correct clubfoot, a congenital condition that causes pain and mobility loss; and one provides children with medication to prevent illness and death from malaria. How do you decide?

Like GiveWell, you may aim to maximize the amount of “good” your donation does. But how can you compare giving opportunities when the good that programs do often looks very different?

Let’s go back to the three options you found. We very roughly estimate that a $10,000 donation might do one of the following:

• Double the consumption of around 15 very poor people for one year
• Correct clubfoot for eight children
• Prevent the death of two children from malaria

Estimating the impact of your donation in this way doesn’t resolve the dilemma of where to give—it just raises other important questions. Which of those outcomes has the greatest impact? Is preventing a child’s death more or less valuable than doubling a household’s income? How much more or less valuable? In order to make a decision about where to donate, you’ll need a way to compare very different outcomes.

GiveWell faces the same set of questions. Because our funding is limited, we have to make choices about which programs to support, but those programs don’t all have the same outcomes. We need a way to compare programs to each other.

Read More

The post Apples, Oranges, and Outcomes appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question?

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about why GiveWell is dedicating more capacity to researching livelihoods programs that aim to increase people's incomes. They discuss how we're building on existing work, searching for new cost-effective opportunities, and exploring more of the impactful programs we've long cared about.

Read More

The post Podcast Episode 7: Deepening GiveWell’s Focus on Livelihoods Programs appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

At GiveWell, we're committed to understanding the impact of our grantmaking and improving our decisions over time. That's why we've begun conducting "lookbacks"—reviews of past grants, typically two to three years after making them, that assess how well they've met our initial expectations and what we can learn from them.

We conduct lookbacks for two main reasons: accountability and learning. By examining both the successes and challenges of past grants and publishing those findings on our website, we aim to be transparent about the impact of donor funding. Systematically reviewing past grants also helps us identify ways to improve our decision-making. When lookbacks identify challenges, lower-than-expected impact, or key questions that we think we should have an answer to, we use these findings to adjust our approach to similar grants in the future or prioritize follow-up research. When lookbacks show higher-than-expected impact, that's valuable, too—in those cases, we made the error of underestimating impact and might be granting too little to certain programs.

Read More

The post What We’ve Learned from Our First Lookbacks appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.