Last updated: September 2026
As we work toward helping many more people in the coming years, several key approaches are guiding our expansion.
Relying on our mission and core values
Our core values of truth-seeking and transparency underpin our work, which aims to find and fund extraordinary giving opportunities to help people in need as much as we can. While we expect the details of our research and grantmaking process to evolve, we'll remain guided by those two ideas:
- Truth-seeking. Rigorous research can help us identify exceptional opportunities to help people.
- Transparency. Sharing what we learn helps us do better.
We are growing because we believe we can direct much more funding to programs that do extraordinary good. If we reach a funding level where we think we can no longer deploy additional donations cost-effectively, we will recommend donors look elsewhere.
Growing our team
Our research is what makes it possible for us to identify highly cost-effective opportunities to save and improve lives. Growing our impact depends on growing our ability to carry out that research. Our research team has more than doubled in size over the past two years to more than 80 people, and we are working to expand it further. Our larger team enables:
- More breadth. Our larger team and our researchers’ expertise across a number of cause areas—malaria, nutrition, water, livelihoods, vaccinations, and more—allows us to explore a wider range of promising programs.
- More depth. As our team grows, we have more capacity to carry out intensive research. As just one example, our May 2026 $276 million grant for insecticide-treated nets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo relied on research we couldn’t have taken on a few years ago, including an analysis of a past grant in which we drew on multiple independent data sources, funded qualitative interviews, and conducted a novel empirical analysis.
Deepening our research
We’re deepening the research that informs our funding decisions, as well as the research we do to assess how programs we’ve funded perform against our expectations.
- Getting better information to inform funding decisions. With increased capacity, we’re able to move from funding existing programs to finding answers to important questions about the evidence of their impact before we make a grant. We’re looking for ways to gather local insights, pressure-test our thinking, and triangulate multiple data sources.
- Expanding our measurement and evaluation of grants. We’re building the capacity to see more clearly what our funding is actually accomplishing—learning what's working and what isn’t, catching our mistakes, and finding ways to do better. Increasingly that means funding independent research organizations to collect and analyze data, rather than just relying on implementing organizations to report on themselves.
Expanding our strategies
We're widening our aperture to consider a larger set of programs and organizations.
- Looking for opportunities across additional cause areas. We’re looking for promising solutions to problems that affect large numbers of people in low-income countries—such as diarrhea, tuberculosis, and stockouts of essential medicines at health facilities—that haven’t yet been thoroughly evaluated or adequately funded. We’re also exploring programs that increase people’s incomes, where long-term impact is often more challenging to measure.
- Improving our knowledge base. In addition to our core grantmaking, we’re 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 generating research about program effectiveness, scoping new promising programs, and piloting new programs.
- Strengthening health systems and infrastructure. Many of the health programs we fund rely for their success on underlying systems and processes, including supply chain management, data systems, and health financing. We think funding that leads to enduring improvements to these systems could plausibly be highly cost-effective.
- Building on areas we know well. Our research is progressing fastest in areas we know well, such as malaria. At a greater scale, we might run insecticide-treated net campaigns more frequently or extend seasonal malaria chemoprevention to cover longer transmission seasons. We could also fund newer approaches for preventing mosquito bites or support for community health workers to diagnose and treat malaria and other common childhood illnesses close to home.
- Exploring large-scale partnerships to scale quickly. We're aiming to build relationships that may help us direct much more funding in the near future. By supporting multilaterals or large NGOs, we think we may be able to create new pathways that use their substantial reach and channels to cost-effectively help many more people quickly.
- Growing the field of organizations we can fund. Some of our grantmaking goes toward increasing the capacity of smaller organizations to use funding cost-effectively. We are supporting early-stage programs, funding research to generate evidence supporting new programs, and helping strong implementers build the capacity to work in more places.