GiveWell’s Expansion Efforts

Last updated: September 2026

GiveWell is growing. We directed $427 million to highly cost-effective programs in 2025, and we project that our grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion in 2026. Our team is currently working hard to build toward a future we think could be several times that scale.

We are grateful to the tens of thousands of donors who have enabled us, over nearly two decades, to use diligent research and analysis to direct donor funding to help people as much as we can. Through that support, we have built—and continue to grow—a research team capable of deploying much more money cost-effectively, while still guided by our core values of truth-seeking and transparency.

More donations and a larger team mean we can do more good in the world, and we continue to actively fundraise for the new opportunities our research team is finding.

More than four million young children die in low- and middle-income countries every year.1 That’s an enormous tragedy—an average of more than 10,000 children each day—and most of those deaths are preventable.2
Support from our donors has helped us make progress, but so much more remains to be done. Our team is currently investigating promising programs at a scale we haven’t previously been able to pursue, and we continue to invite donors at every level to join in this effort.

In this section, you can explore what’s driving our growth, how we’re scaling our impact, and recent examples of our progress—all of which we’ll continue to update as our research progresses.
  • 1

    Our World in Data, “Number of child deaths,” 2024, shows 2.73 million deaths of children under five in low-income countries and 1.60 million in lower-middle-income countries, totaling 4.33 million in 2024.

  • 2

    World Bank Group, “Mortality rate, under-5 (per 1,000 live births)” shows a mortality rate for children under five of 40.8 for low- and middle-income countries and a child mortality rate of 5.1 for high-income countries in 2024. If children under five in low- and middle-income countries were to die at the child mortality rate of high-income countries rather than at their current rate, representing the potential effect of high-income country conditions existing across low- and middle-income countries, 87.5% of child deaths in low- and middle-income countries would be averted: 5.1 / 40.8 = 12.5%, or 1 − 0.125 = 87.5% percent averted.