Relationship Disclosures

Last Updated: May 2025; Published: December 2013

This page discloses personal relationships involving GiveWell’s staff that GiveWell’s audience may wish to consider in evaluating GiveWell’s recommendations or GiveWell as an organization. In general, we will disclose relationships we judge to be highly important in many places (e.g., on our Top Charities page); relationships that appear only on this page are judged by us to be relatively unimportant, but still worth publishing for consideration in line with our transparency value. Note that no relationships to date have fit in the former category.

On this page, we disclose the following sorts of relationships:

  1. Social, romantic, family, or financial relationships between (a) current or former GiveWell staff and (b) people at our Top Charities, former Top Charities, former Standout Charities, or other grant recipients.
  2. Romantic, family, or financial relationships between (a) current or former GiveWell Board members and (b) GiveWell staff.
  3. Romantic, family, or financial relationships between (a) current or former GiveWell Research Council members and (b) people at our Top Charities, former Top Charities, former Standout Charities, or other grant recipients.
  4. Social relationships between (a) GiveWell Board members and (b) GiveWell's Chief Executive Officer that pre-dated GiveWell-based relationships between same. (For example, people who were friends with GiveWell’s Chief Executive Officer prior to joining GiveWell’s Board.)
  5. Other relationships we feel are worth disclosing.

As of the most recent update of this page, these relationships consisted of the following:

Current staff and Board members

  • Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and Evidence Action. GiveWell has recommended a number of grants to CHAI and Evidence Action. As of February 2025, Dr. Neil Buddy Shah (the CEO of CHAI) and Kanika Bahl (the CEO and President of Evidence Action) serve on Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust. Daniela Amodei is the President of Anthropic and a member of Anthropic’s Board of Directors; she is also a member of GiveWell’s Board of Directors. As trustees, Buddy and Kanika have a role in selecting a subset of Anthropic’s Board of Directors (not including Daniela). Daniela recuses herself from any decisions by GiveWell's Board related to Buddy, Kanika, and the organizations they lead.
  • IDinsight. GiveWell has recommended a number of grants to IDinsight. Three current GiveWell staff members were previously employed by IDinsight: Sam Aman, Jenna Amlani, and Alice Redfern.
  • Open Philanthropy. Norma Altshuler is a Senior Program Officer for Global Aid Policy at Open Philanthropy, and is a member of GiveWell’s Board of Directors. GiveWell’s CEO, Elie Hassenfeld, is a member of Open Philanthropy’s Board of Managers. You can read more about the relationship between GiveWell and Open Philanthropy here.

Former staff and Board members

  • IDinsight. We hired Dr. Neil Buddy Shah, IDinsight’s Founding Partner and CEO, as GiveWell’s Managing Director in late 2019. He served in that position from July 2020 to April 2022. We made a $150,000 grant to IDinsight in April 2020 to support its work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time we made this grant, Buddy remained an employee of IDinsight and provided input that shaped our decision to make the grant. Buddy remains a member of IDinsight’s Board of Directors. In March 2024, we made a $94,500 grant to IDinsight to review the Against Malaria Foundation’s monitoring.
  • CHAI. Dr. Neil Buddy Shah was appointed CEO of CHAI in April 2022. Prior to that, he was GiveWell’s Managing Director. We conducted a grant investigation to support a new incubator at CHAI and made a $10.4 million dollar grant in August 2022. Buddy and other CHAI leadership were consulted during our grant investigation and informed our decision to make this grant. In September 2023, GiveWell recommended a $6.6 million grant to CHAI for a two-year diarrhea treatment program in Bauchi, Nigeria. In June 2024, GiveWell recommended a five-year, $15.1 million grant to CHAI to strengthen and support a community-based tuberculosis (TB) household contact management program in India. Buddy was not involved in any discussions GiveWell had with CHAI related to these grants.
  • Evidence Action. Evidence Action is the parent organization of Deworm the World Initiative, a former Top Charity, and Dispensers for Safe Water, a former Standout Charity. GiveWell has also recommended other grants to Evidence Action. From June 2019 through May 2020, Michael Eddy, a GiveWell staff member at the time, rented an apartment from Evidence Action board member Christina Riechers. As of February 2025, Grace Hultquist, a former GiveWell staff member, is working on Evidence Action’s malaria team and has been in communication with GiveWell about potential funding opportunities. Audrey Cooper, who was a Philanthropy Advisor at GiveWell until February 2024, is currently Associate Director of Philanthropy at Evidence Action. Since she joined Evidence Action, she has not been involved in any discussions with GiveWell related to our grants to Evidence Action.
  • Instiglio. We recommended a grant from the Effective Altruism Global Health and Development Fund to support Instiglio in April 2019. Michael Eddy, who co-founded Instiglio, joined GiveWell as a Senior Advisor in June 2019.
  • GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly is a former Top Charity; Paul Niehaus is its Co-Founder and former Co-Executive Director; he currently serves on GiveDirectly’s board.
    Timothy Telleen-Lawton (who was a GiveWell staff member between April 2013 and January 2017) has been friends with Paul Niehaus for many years. When Timothy met Holden Karnofsky (GiveWell’s Co-Founder, Board member, and former Co-Executive Director as of June 2017) in April 2011, he suggested that GiveWell look into GiveDirectly and introduced Holden and Paul by email. GiveWell later recommended GiveDirectly as a Top Charity in November 2012, before Timothy was on GiveWell staff.

    Starting in January 2013, Holden started living in a shared house with Timothy, around the same time Timothy started a trial to work at GiveWell. Paul has visited and stayed at the shared house several times.
    Holden had not met Paul, or interacted significantly with Paul or Tim, prior to moving to San Francisco in January 2013. Tim was not responsible for evaluative work on GiveDirectly.

    Nick Allardice, who became GiveDirectly’s CEO and President in 2024, previously worked with GiveWell as a paid consultant.

  • END Fund. The END Fund is a former Top Charity that supports deworming programs. When GiveWell added the END Fund to our list of Top Charities, Sarah Marchal Murray served as its Chief Operating Officer. Sarah was previously the Director of Institutional Advancement at the Center for Global Development, where David Roodman, who has worked for GiveWell reviewing evidence related to deworming, was employed from 2002 to 2013. Sarah left the END Fund in 2017 and performed work for GiveWell as a consultant in 2018.
  • One for the World. We recommended grants to support One for the World in July 2018, October 2019, May 2021, and May 2022. In April 2019, Stephanie Stojanovic joined GiveWell as a Major Gifts Officer and later served as GiveWell’s Director of Development until February 2025. Stephanie was involved in organizing One for the World events; her husband, Steve Hind, was Chair of One for the World’s Advisory Board and Executive Committee at the time we made the first three grants.
  • Rob Reich. Stanford professor Rob Reich served on GiveWell’s Board of Directors from December 2013 to April 2019. Professor Reich had a pre-existing friendship with former GiveWell employee Alexander Berger, who was one of his students when in college. (As of June 2017, Alexander is an employee of Open Philanthropy.) Professor Reich is also co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, for which Cari Tuna (another GiveWell Board member, and President of Good Ventures) was previously a member of the Advisory Board.

Research Council members

  • Busara. In February 2025, GiveWell signed a contract of about $168,000 to Busara to fund a qualitative survey of actors in the chain of delivery for Helen Keller Intl’s vitamin A supplementation program in Nigeria. Gideon Too, a member of our Research Council, is the vice president for research and advisory at Busara. He did not participate in any internal GiveWell discussions related to the grant.
  • Center for Global Development. In May 2024, GiveWell approved a $197,000 grant to the Center for Global Development (CGD) for a research project to answer the question: “If the opportunities GiveWell funds are highly effective and relatively low cost, why aren't they already funded by other groups focused on saving lives?” James Habyarimana, a member of our Research Council, is a non-resident fellow at CGD. Amrita Ahuja, also a member of our Research Council, is on CGD’s board. Rachel Glennerster, a former member of GiveWell’s Research Council, is President of CGD. None of them was involved in any internal GiveWell discussions related to the grant.
  • Evidence Action. GiveWell has recommended a number of grants to Evidence Action. Amrita Ahuja, a member of our Research Council, is co-founder of Evidence Action and is a current board member. Lalit Kumar, another member of our Research Council, is former Africa director for Evidence Action. While they have been involved in conversations related to our chlorination grantmaking as members of the Research Council, neither was involved in internal GiveWell discussions related to our grants to Evidence Action since becoming members of the Research Council.
  • London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In May 2024, GiveWell recommended a grant of up to $4.8 million for a randomized trial measuring the economic effect of providing eyeglasses to working age adults with near-vision impairments. James Tibenderana, a member of our Research Council, is an honorary associate professor in the Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases at LSHTM. He was not involved in any internal GiveWell discussions related to the grant.
  • Malaria Consortium. GiveWell has approved many grants to Malaria Consortium, whose seasonal malaria chemoprevention program is one of our Top Charities. James Tibenderana, a member of our Research Council, is Chief Executive of Malaria Consortium. GiveWell researchers speak with him regularly, including conversations related to possible funding opportunities at Malaria Consortium and elsewhere.
  • Precision Development. In 2022 and 2023, GiveWell approved several grants (grant pages here and here) to Precision Development. Amrita Ahuja, a member of our Research Council, is on Precision Development’s board. Carolyne Nekesa, another member of our Research Council, was former director of Precision Development’s Kenya operations. GiveWell has not recommended any grants to Precision Development since forming the Research Council.
  • Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). GiveWell has approved several grants to Y-RISE. Most recently, in July 2024, GiveWell approved a $1.3 million grant to Y-RISE to support a cluster randomized controlled trial of a water entrepreneurship program. Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, a member of our Research Council, is founder and faculty director of Y-RISE. He authored the proposal for the Y-RISE grant and was our primary point of contact.

Consultants

  • In October 2021, we recommended a grant of up to $25 million to IRD Global to support its mobile phone-based conditional cash transfer program and Sindh Electronic Immunization Registry, and we extended our support of the program in February 2023. We also recommended a series of grants totaling approximately $2.3 million for IRD Global's Zero TB program in April 2021, November 2021, August 2022, and March 2023. In April 2023, GiveWell recommended a grant of up to $5.4 million to IRD Global for organizational support. In March 2024, GiveWell recommended a grant of up to $800,000 for IRD Global to pilot a program using text messages to promote breastfeeding. Since 2015, GiveWell consultant Karen Levy has had a professional relationship with the leadership of IRD Global (including Aamir Khan, Executive Director, and Subhash Chandir, Senior Epidemiologist and Director). Since March 2022, Karen has been providing strategic advisory services to IRD through her firm, Fit for Purpose. Karen has been a consultant for GiveWell since February 2020.