In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett, who leads GiveWell’s water research subteam, about the grant. They discuss how the program works, what prior research tells us about its potential, the significant uncertainties involved, and what GiveWell expects to learn.

Elie and Erin discuss:

• How WASHmobile works: When someone in a household has diarrheal disease, others in the household are at much higher risk. To reduce this risk, WASHmobile first identifies children who have been hospitalized with severe diarrhea. A health worker visits their family to provide handwashing supplies and chlorine tablets to disinfect water, then follows up with phone reminders about safe water practices. Because household members often share the same water source and live in close quarters, treating water and improving hygiene during this critical window can prevent further infections and deaths. Trials of more intensive versions of this program found reductions in diarrheal disease of roughly 60%. Our grant also includes a second, lower-cost component that sends SMS alerts and digital chlorine vouchers to people living near detected outbreaks.
• Navigating uncertainty in fragile contexts: WASHmobile is being implemented in South Kivu (DRC) and Jonglei State (South Sudan) by Tearfund, which is partnering closely with the countries’ ministries of health. Because of active armed conflict, severe flooding, and large displaced populations, these areas are challenging for health program implementation. GiveWell is funding a version of the program that is less intensive than the one studied in trials, with shorter duration and less intensive follow-up, and we have discounted expected effects accordingly. Even with those adjustments and a substantial probability of program failure built into our modeling, we estimate the program could be highly cost-effective because disease burden in these areas is so high.
• Building learning into the grant: Roughly half of the grant funds implementation, and half is dedicated to evaluation and data collection. In DRC, GiveWell is funding Johns Hopkins University, in partnership with Catholic University of Bukavu, to conduct a randomized controlled trial alongside implementation to measure the program’s effect on hospital admissions for diarrhea among children under five. The trial will also help test one of the key assumptions in our cost-effectiveness model: that the families this program targets are actually at higher mortality risk than the general population. In South Sudan, where a full trial wasn’t feasible, we’re funding mortality surveys and operational monitoring to better understand baseline mortality and whether the program is being implemented as intended.

This grant reflects how GiveWell’s growing team capacity allows us to do more than scale up proven programs; it also enables us to investigate new, cost-effective ways to save and improve lives beyond our traditional grantmaking portfolio. In addition, our growing capacity means we’re increasingly able to help bridge the gap between academic research and real-world implementation—funding promising programs alongside the rigorous evaluation needed to determine whether they should be scaled further.

Visit our All Grants Fund page to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for our latest updates.

This episode was recorded on June 10, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Tackling Diarrheal Disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

In 2025, we committed $418 million in grants. Though we’re just halfway through the year, we’ve already committed over $400 million in 2026. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion this year, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale.

We’re excited to share another major step in that direction. Coefficient Giving has decided to increase its near-term funding commitment for GiveWell grants to $1 billion in support of our continued scaling.

This commitment is both extraordinary and timely. Near-term needs continue to far surpass our fundraising expectations, and we are actively working to raise more funds to support a growing set of cost-effective opportunities to help people in need.

What’s driving our increased grantmaking

Several factors have driven our current expansion, as well as our ability to continue scaling.

Team growth

We have been growing rapidly over the past two years, going from 38 research team members to 79, and we’re continuing to hire. With this growth, we’ve been able to evaluate more funding opportunities and continue expanding our search for a wider set of cost-effective programs to fund.

More experience

We’re also seeing the benefits of an experienced bench of researchers, whose knowledge and relationships are combining to enable GiveWell to find outstanding opportunities and direct funding to them faster.

Larger grants

Our researchers are explicitly searching for bigger opportunities than we’ve had the resources to investigate and to fund in the past.

Responding to cuts in foreign aid

In 2025, we responded to urgent needs that arose from substantial disruptions to global health funding. This year, we have been monitoring foreign aid funding to maintain a clear picture of where it has been renewed, where it has been discontinued, and where cost-effective gaps are emerging so that we can help people in need as much as we can.

Lowering our cost-effectiveness threshold

We maintain a cost-effectiveness threshold at a level where we expect to be able to fully fund all the opportunities we find above it. As our funding projections increase, we are able to lower the threshold and fund more great opportunities than we otherwise could.

Our need for more funding

Coefficient Giving’s commitment comes at a particularly important time for two reasons. First, the needs remain enormous. More than four million young children die in low- and middle-income countries every year¹Our 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.—and most of those deaths are preventable.²World 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. Support from our donors has helped us make progress, but so much more remains to be done.

Second, we believe that there will be substantial new philanthropic resources in the coming years, and we want to be in a position to help donors save and improve lives as much as we can. This means we have a lot of work to do so our team, grantees, and other partners, such as country health systems, are ready.

The needs and opportunities before us far exceed our current resources. Our growing team is investigating promising programs at a scale we haven’t previously been able to pursue—and we continue to invite donors to help us meet them.

We’re not looking to grow just because there may be more money available or because a bigger GiveWell is necessarily better. We’re doing this because we believe GiveWell can direct much more funding to where it will have exceptional impact, and we will tell you if we reach a funding level where we think there are more effective options.

We’re grateful for this commitment from Coefficient Giving—and for the trust and generosity of all our donors who are helping us work toward even greater impact.

The post Scaling Our Impact, With Support From a $1 Billion Commitment appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Serious health problems, such as lack of medical oxygen and stockouts of essential medicines at health facilities, affect millions of people in low-income countries. There may be highly cost-effective solutions to these problems that haven’t been thoroughly evaluated or adequately funded. One of the ways GiveWell is searching for these solutions is through the new areas research subteam, which investigates programs in cause areas GiveWell hasn’t historically focused on.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dan Brown about GiveWell’s new areas research subteam and three grants that illustrate the team’s work.

Elie and Dan discuss:

• Evaluating whether electronic tracking can improve access to health supplies: In many low- and middle-income countries, health facilities track their medicine supplies on paper, with stock counted roughly once a month for only a subset of products. As a result, staff may be less able to accurately predict inventory levels. This can lead to stockouts, making it more difficult for people to access the treatment they need, or to surplus commodities, which could result in expired medicines. GiveWell is funding the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), mSupply Foundation, and University of California, Berkeley to implement an electronic supply chain management system in health facilities in Laos and conduct a randomized controlled trial measuring whether the system reduces stockouts and improves patients’ access to the treatments they need. If we learn that more people are able to access treatment as a result, funding the rollout of this type of software in countries facing higher burdens of disease could be a cost-effective strategy for reducing mortality.
• Supporting a new approach to medical oxygen production: Medical oxygen is essential for treating severe pneumonia, malaria, and many other health conditions—yet access in low-income countries remains limited. GiveWell is funding PATH to assess the market viability of a recently developed oxygen-producing device that appears to require far less maintenance than existing technology. This is an early-stage investment focused on understanding manufacturing costs and potential demand. PATH’s work will run concurrently with research funded by other organizations assessing whether the device works effectively in real-world conditions in low-income countries. We’re also investigating other opportunities to improve the ability to diagnose low oxygen and increase access to a reliable oxygen supply in health facilities.
• Investigating a caregiver training program for newborn health: Noora Health’s Care Companion Program trains family members in practices that support maternal and newborn health, including skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding techniques, and how to recognize illness warning signs. The existing evidence base for the program is limited to one study without a control group (making it difficult to assess if the practices actually caused the results), so GiveWell is funding two studies in India: a pilot study assessing intermediate health outcomes like sepsis and umbilical cord infections that are linked to newborn mortality, and a larger randomized controlled trial measuring the program’s effect on neonatal mortality. We expect that these studies will provide additional evidence needed to assess whether to fund the program at scale, potentially reducing childhood deaths.

These grants reflect just a few of the ways GiveWell’s research is expanding to identify more high-impact opportunities to help people. GiveWell is hiring to expand our research team further—including positions on the new areas subteam—so we can cover more ground and ultimately direct more donor funding faster to programs where it can do extraordinary good.

Visit our All Grants Fund page to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for our latest updates.

This episode was recorded on June 12, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Casting a Wider Net for Cost-Effective Programs appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Growing Our Largest Research Area: Malaria

Despite significant progress over the past few decades, malaria still kills around 600,000 people annually, mostly young children in Africa. While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise of our malaria research subteam are now enabling us to take on this challenge in ways that would not have been possible even a few years ago.

Among our efforts, we are:

• Funding evidence generation to improve future grantmaking decisions: We’re funding new studies and strengthening monitoring and evaluation data for the programs we already support. For example, we funded studies on how long nets provide protection in Nigeria and Cameroon, which could inform how often campaigns should be conducted to maximize their cost-effectiveness and impact.
• Identifying ways to increase coverage of our core programs: With a larger team, we have been able to look for more ways to increase the number of people benefiting from seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) and insecticide-treated nets. We funded a grant aimed at understanding the most significant barriers to net use and another to learn more about whether SMC campaigns could successfully expand to help more children.
• Searching for new opportunities to help more people: Despite widespread implementation of very effective malaria prevention programs, like SMC and nets, many people are still infected and die each year. To find additional cost-effective strategies that are not yet widely deployed, GiveWell’s malaria subteam recently launched a request for information from potential grantees.

For more than a decade, GiveWell has been at the forefront of malaria prevention, and we’re excited about the progress we’re making as we continue to expand this work. Read more.

“Looking Back to Give Better” Webinar Recap

GiveWell’s latest webinar took a close look at a critical step in our research process: evaluating past grants to understand what happened, why, and how we can use what we learned to improve our grantmaking over time. GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld, Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller, and Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury discussed four recent comprehensive grant lookbacks and answered audience questions. Read more and watch the recording.

Expanding Our Search for Cost-Effective Ways to Reduce Poverty

We’re building capacity to explore programs that increase people’s incomes—where long-term impact is harder to measure and effectiveness varies significantly across contexts. In September 2025, we created a dedicated livelihoods research subteam focused on programs that improve the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty.

In our recent podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury about GiveWell’s expanding work on livelihoods programs, which programs might be the most cost-effective, and research we’re funding to help answer some key questions.

Elie and Adam discuss:

• Testing variations of cash transfers: GiveDirectly’s flagship cash transfer program currently falls below our cost-effectiveness threshold for livelihoods interventions, but it has a proven ability to scale. We funded three pilots to test whether specific program adaptations could improve cost-effectiveness enough to meet our threshold.
• Exploring poverty graduation programs: These programs provide extremely poor households with a tool to generate income, such as a sewing machine, along with training and small amounts of money or food so families have what they need without selling the asset. We’re considering funding research to assess which program designs are most cost-effective, whether income increases hold up over longer time periods, and whether programs can be implemented effectively at scale.
• Funding research to address key uncertainties: By funding research tied to programs we’re considering supporting, we aim to make better funding decisions and increase donors’ impact. For example, we had a consultant scrutinize the data from a randomized controlled trial of GiveDirectly’s flagship program in Kenya—and the findings held up. We’re now funding research to assess whether the results generalize and are considering further studies to learn more about whether the effects persist over time.

Read our episode summary for more, and subscribe to be notified of our newest episodes.

Grant Spotlight

Our grantmaking aims to support programs and research that save and improve lives the most per dollar. Here’s a look at one recent example:

Where: Rwanda and Uganda
What: Technical assistance and advocacy to expand rural trailbridge construction
Who: Fika (formerly Bridges to Prosperity)
Total: Approximately $6.5 million
How it works: In rural Rwanda and Uganda, rivers and ravines can cut communities off from markets, health facilities, and schools. Fika provides technical assistance and advocacy to help governments and private construction firms build more trailbridges in rural areas—advising on contractor selection, overseeing construction quality, and advocating for increased public investment in rural bridge infrastructure. We expect the work funded by this grant to result in approximately 90 additional bridges being built.
Why this grant: We estimate that people served by bridges experience a 3% increase in annual consumption, based on preliminary results from a randomized controlled trial of Fika’s bridge program and other quasi-experimental evidence. While the bridges are relatively expensive to construct, they serve thousands of people and the benefits persist for years. This is one of GiveWell’s first grants focused on rural infrastructure as part of our expanded focus on livelihoods programs.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s Unrestricted Fund

Hiring Announcements

Featured Role: Senior Researchers
We’re hiring more Senior Researchers across three grantmaking subteams—malaria, new areas, and nutrition—to help direct hundreds of millions of dollars to highly cost-effective global health and development programs.

• Senior Malaria Researcher: Shape the research agenda for our largest grantmaking portfolio. Work on questions like how new insecticides affect the cost-effectiveness of nets, what emerging prevention tools could achieve at scale, and how our portfolio should respond to new technologies.
• Senior New Areas Researcher: Explore interventions that are newer to GiveWell, from family planning and maternal and newborn health to emerging areas like medical oxygen and AI in global health. Build the evidence base to determine whether a new program meets our cost-effectiveness threshold for funding.
• Senior Nutrition Researcher: Deepen our work across our primary nutrition focus areas: vitamin A supplementation, iron supplementation, and treatment of acute malnutrition. Scrutinize program coverage and quality, strengthen our cost-effectiveness models, and expand our grantmaking into new geographies.

We have several other open positions—if you know someone who might be a good fit, please share the link and encourage them to apply.

• Senior Cross-Cutting Researcher
• Senior Livelihoods Researcher
• Senior Vaccination Researcher
• Senior Water Researcher
• Senior Accountant
• Staff Accountant
• Senior Recruiter, Operations and Outreach

Partner Roundup

• Learn how Helen Keller Intl uses vitamin A supplementation to fight malnutrition during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life.
• Read about the digital tools Malaria Consortium is studying to help protect more children against malaria in Mozambique.
• Celebrate the workers who make New Incentives’ program to increase childhood vaccinations possible.

Comments or Questions?

We’re always looking for fresh perspectives on our research. If you have comments or questions about our work, we want to hear from you! Reach out to us at info@givewell.org.

The post June 2026 updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Our research spans the full lifecycle of grants. Before we approve funding for a grant, our research team reviews academic evidence, builds cost-effectiveness models, and consults with experts to estimate the program’s expected impact. When programs near the end of their funding, we investigate whether a grant achieved the impact we initially projected. In 2025, our growing research capacity enabled us to expand this final step for select grants and publish comprehensive evaluations that we call “lookbacks.”

During the webinar, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld moderated a discussion with Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller and Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury. They covered four examples of grant lookbacks—discussing what we’ve learned and how these lessons are informing our work—and answered questions from the audience live.

Elie, Alex, Julie, and Adam discussed:

• Cash incentives that are more cost-effective than we estimated: New Incentives aims to increase coverage of routine childhood vaccinations in northern Nigeria by providing small cash incentives to caregivers who bring their children to health clinics for vaccinations. GiveWell has directed over $140 million in grants to support the program since it became a Top Charity in 2020. One of GiveWell’s first lookbacks was on our initial $17 million grant to New Incentives. We found the program was about twice as cost-effective as we initially estimated—saving around 8,000 lives. The program reached roughly twice as many children as expected, at about half the cost per enrolled child. This difference from our initial estimate illustrates the uncertainty in our cost-effectiveness estimates and the value of ongoing monitoring, reassessing our analysis, and collecting additional information beyond what’s included in our models—such as an implementer’s track record, conversations with experts and local officials, or qualitative reasons to think a program might outperform its initial estimate.
• Following the data to a difficult decision on chlorine dispensers: In 2022, GiveWell made a grant of around $65 million to support Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water program, which installs chlorine dispensers for households to treat their drinking water. Our lookback found that roughly a third as many people were using the dispensers as we had estimated. This discrepancy was identified after a separate GiveWell-funded study in Kenya suggested chlorination rates were far lower than Evidence Action’s routine monitoring indicated, prompting GiveWell and Evidence Action to commission independent surveys in Uganda and Malawi. As a result of this finding, which we believe was caused by several contributing factors, we decided not to renew our funding, though we continue to support chlorine dispensers in other contexts where we believe they will be highly cost-effective. This lookback exemplifies the importance of GiveWell’s growing ability to gather and analyze additional sources of monitoring data.
• Strengthening our data and evaluation of insecticide-treated net distributions: The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF), a GiveWell Top Charity, supports large-scale distributions of insecticide-treated nets. We looked back on a grant to AMF in 2023 to support this work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The lookback found that the net campaigns reduced the risk of child death by about 25%, leading the grant to be about as cost-effective as we originally estimated. Learning from previous lookbacks, we collected and analyzed new data sources to better measure the grant’s results. For example, researchers analyzed the timing of children’s births relative to the date of different local net campaigns as a natural experiment, examined three independent quantitative sources, and commissioned qualitative research involving in-depth interviews with people involved in DRC’s net distribution system.
• Challenges looking back on grants for government advisory support: Between 2016 and 2022, GiveWell directed $13 million across three grants to support Results for Development’s program to improve treatment for children with pneumonia in Tanzania by providing advisory support—that is, technical assistance—to the government. Our lookback found that the share of health facilities stocking amoxicillin-DT, used to treat pneumonia, rose from approximately 48% to 90%, and that financing and procurement fully transitioned to the government. However, it is more challenging to know what would have happened in the absence of technical assistance—in this case, because the government was already working toward this goal. Though our confidence isn’t as strong as for other lookbacks, the team gathered some indirect measures of impact—such as stock rates for amoxicillin-DT growing faster than other medicines not targeted by the grant. This lookback taught us the importance of interrogating the theory of change for future technical assistance grants to understand how activities are addressing bottlenecks and to identify reliable predictors of success, such as existing government relationships.

During the audience Q&A, the panelists fielded a range of questions from the more than 200 attendees. These included examples when qualitative data has informed our grantmaking decisions, how GiveWell has been using AI tools to responsibly extend research capacity, and how we distinguish between predictable and unpredictable program disruptions when evaluating grants.

Panelists also discussed how they expect lookbacks will influence GiveWell’s research in the future. Adam shared how lessons from technical assistance lookbacks, like the one for Results for Development, are already informing active grant investigations. Alex discussed the additional potential for lookbacks to help GiveWell be a better grantmaker over time by teaching us how programmatic changes can increase a grant’s impact. Julie highlighted how lookbacks are setting us up to learn by helping us make better decisions at the start of a grant, such as external monitoring choices.

To close the event, Elie addressed a final question about GiveWell’s long-term success. The world has a huge amount of need—approximately 4 million children die in low- and middle-income countries each year, and most of those deaths are preventable.¹“An estimated 4.8 million children died before reaching their fifth birthday in 2023—deaths that were overwhelmingly preventable.” UNICEF, “Levels and Trends in Childhood Mortality,” 2025.

“In 2024, an estimated 4.9 million children under the age of 5 years died worldwide, equivalent to one death every 6 seconds.” World Health Organization, “Child Mortality (under 5 years),” 2026.

Our World in Data, “Number of Child Deaths by Region,” 2026, shows 4.0 million child deaths in 2023 in sub‑Saharan Africa (~2.8M) and southern Asia (~1.2M), where nearly all countries are classified as low- or middle-income (see map in Metreau, Young, and Eapen 2026). We’re very grateful for donors’ support that has allowed us to make larger and larger inroads against these significant problems. We expect that in 2026 we will direct the most funding that we ever have to save and improve lives.

Through lookbacks, we are learning from past grants to continuously improve our grantmaking portfolio and to direct donor funding where we believe it can help people in need the most.

Visit our All Grants Fund page to learn more about how you can support this work.

This webinar was recorded on June 9, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time. A transcript of the webinar is available.

The post Looking Back to Give Better: A Webinar Recap appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Historically, GiveWell has predominantly focused on health-related programs. Diseases like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia can be prevented fairly cheaply, and the evidence for health programs is often strong relative to other areas. As our research team has grown, we’ve been building capacity to explore programs that increase people’s incomes, where the long-term impact is often more challenging to measure and effectiveness differs from context to context.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury about GiveWell’s expanding work on livelihoods programs, which programs might be the most cost-effective, and research we’re funding to help answer some key questions.

Elie and Adam discuss:

• Testing variations of cash transfers: GiveDirectly’s flagship cash transfer program currently falls below our cost-effectiveness threshold for livelihoods interventions, but it has a proven ability to scale. We funded three pilots to test whether specific program adaptations could improve cost-effectiveness enough to meet our threshold: (1) pairing small grants to local businesses with household cash transfers so vendors can stock up to meet new demand, (2) timing cash transfers to coincide with the construction of a new footbridge so recipients can access markets more easily, and (3) targeting cash transfers to the poorest young adults, who may be at a stage in their lives where a large lump sum transfer might be especially impactful.
• Exploring poverty graduation programs: Poverty graduation programs provide extremely poor households with a tool to generate income, such as a sewing machine, along with training and small amounts of money or food so that families have what they need without selling the asset. Evidence shows that these programs increase incomes over the first couple of years, and more recent evidence suggests these effects can persist for five years or longer. We are considering grants for research to assess which program designs are most cost-effective, whether income increases hold up over even longer time periods, and whether the programs can be implemented effectively at scale. Because around two-thirds of poverty graduation programs are now delivered by governments rather than NGOs, we are also exploring opportunities to support these programs by providing technical assistance to governments.
• Funding research to address key uncertainties: By funding research directly tied to programs we are considering supporting, we aim to make better funding decisions and increase donors’ impact. For example, we had a consultant scrutinize the original data from a randomized controlled trial of GiveDirectly’s flagship program in Kenya that showed positive economic effects in the broader community—and the research held up. We’re now funding other research to assess whether the results can be generalized and considering studies to learn whether their effects persist beyond a few years.

GiveWell is expanding our search for highly cost-effective ways to help people in new areas this year by hiring for new research positions, including a senior livelihoods researcher. As the livelihoods team grows, we aim to evaluate more of the areas in the space, including expanding financial access, improving agricultural activity, and looking at humanitarian response efforts—to make better-informed decisions about where donor funding can do the most good.

Visit our All Grants Fund page to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for our latest updates.

This episode was recorded on May 26, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Expanding Our Search for Cost-Effective Ways to Reduce Poverty appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team are allowing us to take on this challenge now in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago.

Over our nineteen-year history, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion in donations to malaria prevention programs that we estimate will save more than 235,000 lives. This is primarily through two core programs:²As other prevention programs have emerged, such as malaria vaccines, we have also supported them when we estimated that doing so would be highly cost-effective.

• Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which provides preventive antimalarial medication to young children during the months when malaria is mostly likely to be transmitted. We have directed more than $500 million to support SMC, most via Malaria Consortium’s SMC program, one of our Top Charities.
• Insecticide-treated nets, which are typically hung over beds or other sleeping spaces to provide protection from mosquitoes at night. We have directed more than $600 million to support net campaigns, most via Against Malaria Foundation, another of our Top Charities.

GiveWell’s overall research team has doubled in size over the past few years. Our malaria research team is the largest of our research teams, with 15 people collectively devoting more than 20,000 hours each year to our expanded efforts.³We expect each research staff member contributes about 1,840 hours per year, accounting for holidays and time off, about 75% of which is spent on research work (1840 x 15 x 0.75 = 20,700). For more on how we calculate research hours per person, see here.

With this growth, we are working to reduce malaria deaths even further by (1) funding evidence to improve our future grantmaking decisions for core malaria prevention programs, (2) identifying ways to increase coverage of our core programs, and (3) expanding our portfolio beyond our core programs.

Funding Evidence to Improve Future Grantmaking Decisions

GiveWell’s primary focus has always been researching, identifying, and directing donations to programs we believe will do the most good. That work requires understanding the impact of the programs we support as well as we can by collecting information about them. This is particularly important when making decisions about how to allocate large amounts of funding, as in the case of SMC and nets. Our efforts to gather stronger data and evidence on malaria prevention strategies have focused on funding new studies, as well as strengthening monitoring and evaluation data for the programs we already fund.

We have funded several grants to collect information that will allow us to resolve some of our uncertainties and refine our cost-effectiveness estimates. For example, we funded household surveys in Democratic Republic of the Congo to collect data on the prevalence of malaria infections, net durability, and the proportion of people likely to use nets without a nets campaign. We expect this will help us make better decisions if we decide to fund additional nets campaigns in the country.

Since there is limited evidence about how long insecticide-treated nets—particularly new types of nets that use two insecticides—provide protection, we also funded studies in Nigeria and Cameroon to assess how long the insecticide in the nets is effective at killing and repelling mosquitoes, as well as how long nets maintain their physical integrity. This will help us refine our estimate of how long nets provide protection, which will improve our estimates of nets’ impact and might inform how often we will consider funding campaigns.

We have also been working to support monitoring and evaluation efforts. The rest of this section takes a closer look at one example: We recently funded IDinsight and the Institut de Recherche en Sciences de la Santé (IRSS) – Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro (CRUN), a Burkina Faso-based medical research center, to help us answer some questions that emerged when a team of GiveWell researchers dug into the monitoring and evaluation data we received on SMC campaigns led by Malaria Consortium.

At the end of each annual SMC round, external firms, selected by Malaria Consortium through an open bidding process, conduct household interviews to estimate the number of children who received preventive malaria medication during the campaign.⁴This is in addition to monthly household surveys conducted by Malaria Consortium following each monthly cycle that are used for their monitoring and evaluation purposes. We believe the surveys provide relatively strong evidence that a high proportion of the targeted population is reached, but the surveys aren’t perfect. We’re particularly uncertain about two potential sources of bias:

• First, we know from past experience that there are many ways bias can creep into monitoring and evaluation processes. We don’t know whether this is the case for Malaria Consortium’s SMC program, but having an independent organization gather additional data will provide us with more information about potential biases.
• Second, the surveys depend on caregivers accurately reporting whether their children received all of the doses of SMC medication. During an SMC campaign, a community distributor provides each child with the first day’s medication, then gives the remaining doses to the child’s caregiver, who then administers one dose on each of the following two days. Our current understanding is that receiving all doses is critical for full protection of children from clinical malaria, and we want to have a clear picture of the extent to which this takes place. We think there is a risk caregivers are not giving medications on day two and three but reporting they are, either because they misremember or because they feel pressure to report that they followed the recommended treatment correctly.

The work, implemented by CRUN with IDinsight providing validation governance, project management, technical backstopping, and quality assurance support, will address both of these potential sources of bias. To address the question of bias during data collection, CRUN will conduct an independent coverage survey, using an approach similar to that used by Malaria Consortium, in around 1,500 households across the six regions of Burkina Faso where GiveWell funds Malaria Consortium’s SMC program. The survey will happen around the same time as Malaria Consortium’s end-of-round survey. This will provide us with independent coverage data that we can compare to the results from Malaria Consortium.

The study is designed to provide us with more information about the extent to which children receive all of the doses of SMC medication. CRUN will collect dried blood samples from all eligible children enrolled in the study sample, which will provide us with two types of important information.⁵All biological sample collection will be conducted under the applicable ethical approvals, informed consent procedures, and participant protection requirements in Burkina Faso.

• First, the SMC drug levels found in children’s blood will be compared to the self-reported adherence estimates collected both in Malaria Consortium’s survey and the independent survey. We think this will allow us to check the reliability of self-reported adherence estimates. If this proves to be a feasible approach, it could be implemented across GiveWell’s broader SMC portfolio as a way to triangulate and confirm other sources of data.
• Second, the blood samples will also be tested for malaria parasites; by assessing both the drug concentration and malaria parasites from the same children, we will learn how receiving each dose of medicine affects malaria parasite levels. We’ll also be able to combine what we learn with the results of a randomized controlled trial that we’ve recently funded that looks specifically at how malaria parasite levels correlate to malaria morbidity. This will tell us how SMC’s effectiveness changes with the number of doses received.

What we learn will help us refine our cost-effectiveness estimates, which will help us make better decisions in the future. For example, if we learn children are receiving fewer doses than we currently estimate, and the second and third doses are important to SMC’s effectiveness, we would revise downward our estimate of the program’s benefits. What we learn could also provide useful insights for increasing the impact of Malaria Consortium’s program. For example, if we find adherence is lower than we expect, we could consider changes in delivery, such as having a community distributor observe the children being given all doses of the medication or providing more information to caregivers about the importance of giving children all of the doses.

These are just a few of the malaria grants we’ve made recently to get the information we need to make even better funding decisions in the future—and we’re funding an increased number of these value of information grants across our grantmaking areas.

Identifying Ways to Increase Coverage of Our Core Programs

With a larger, more specialized research team, we have also been looking for ways to increase the number of people that benefit from SMC and nets.

For example, we estimate that only about 63% of insecticide-treated nets provided through GiveWell-funded mass distributions are hung above sleeping spaces to provide protection against mosquitos.⁶See this section of our report on insecticide-treated nets. Because so many nets are distributed—more than 180 million globally in 2024⁷“In 2024, a total of 181 million ITNs were distributed globally by NMPs [national malaria programs] in malaria endemic countries.” World Health Organization, World Malaria Report 2025, p. 68. (GiveWell provided funding in 2024 for around 28 million⁸Around 24.5 million via AMF, and 3.6 million via Malaria Consortium. Note that GiveWell funding approved in 2024 may have been for net campaigns during future years.)—increasing usage by even a small amount could make a big difference. We recently made two grants to inform our longer-term aim of increasing the number of people using the nets they’ve received.

The first grant, to Malaria Consortium and the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), seeks to understand the most significant barriers to net use. In the initial phases of the project, researchers worked to identify some of the barriers that prevent people from regularly using mosquito nets by reviewing the scholarly literature, talking with people in Nigeria and Uganda, and directly observing people hanging, using, and maintaining nets. The researchers used behavioral science methodologies to identify a number of barriers to net use—such as misconceptions about the nets, low risk perception, or practical obstacles—then came up with possible interventions to address them. After ranking them by feasibility and impact, researchers identified the top two: (1) reinforcing positive social norms around net use and (2) distributing preferred types of nets. Malaria Consortium and BIT then conducted small pilots to determine the feasibility and acceptability of those interventions.

For example, they tested a range of net types and found some evidence that soft, colored (rather than white) nets were preferred in some of the communities in Nigeria and Uganda where they conducted their research. Those findings are based on a small, non-randomized sample; we don’t know whether that evidence is generalizable beyond those contexts, and we don’t know whether satisfying that preference would lead to an increase in net use. We are currently considering whether to fund a larger study on net preferences to learn more about whether the preliminary findings from the small pilot are consistent in other settings and to determine if this could be a cost-effective opportunity to increase net use.

The second grant we funded was to Tropical Health to carry out a small scoping study to begin to identify messages and ways of communicating that are likely to have a positive and measurable impact on net use in Nigeria. The findings of this initial scoping study have the potential to inform a grant for a larger evaluation of social and behavioral change interventions to increase net use, which would take place in Nigerian states where we have recently funded upcoming net campaigns, but which had not had net campaigns for at least eight years previously. Because of the different context, this study may have different findings and be an important complement to Malaria Consortium and BIT’s research.

Removing barriers to net usage is only one way to increase the number of people benefiting from malaria prevention programs. For example, most SMC campaigns take place in West Africa where strong evidence gives us confidence in the effectiveness of the drug combination used, but there are millions of children in eastern and southern Africa that could potentially benefit from chemoprevention.

We have substantial uncertainties about the effectiveness of SMC drugs in eastern and southern Africa, where malaria parasites are resistant to one of the drugs. While we have funded trials and supported some SMC programs in that region, before we scale up our funding we would like stronger evidence on which drug combinations work and whether using certain drugs could increase resistance.

To address our uncertainties and learn more about whether chemoprevention campaigns could be fruitfully expanded to help more children, we recently funded the largest individualized randomized controlled trial of SMC outside of West Africa. The trial, which we discussed in a recent podcast episode, will test three drugs alone and in different combinations across roughly 7,000 children in Malawi. We’ll learn about the efficacy of the two drugs currently used in SMC (sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine and amodiaquine), as well as an additional drug (chloroquine) that had previously shown resistance but might now be effective again.

Depending on what we learn, this trial could lead to cost-effective opportunities to provide preventive malaria medication to millions of additional children each year.

Expanding Our Portfolio Beyond Our Core Programs

Despite widespread implementation of very effective malaria prevention programs like SMC and nets, many people are infected and die each year. We think building a broader portfolio of cost-effective and evidence-informed strategies to prevent malaria is an important next step.

To determine which approaches to implement, National Malaria Control Programs (part of the Ministry of Health in countries where malaria is endemic) depend on guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO), which systematically evaluates the safety and efficacy of potential treatments and flags relevant contextual factors for treatment selection. We believe that existing guidelines may not cover all optimal treatments, so we recently made a grant to WHO’s Global Malaria Programme to fund evidence reviews and convene a Guidelines Development Group (GDG) to update the guidelines with recommendations for two potentially promising malaria interventions: (1) single low-dose primaquine to reduce transmissibility of malaria parasites, particularly in areas at risk of drug resistance, and (2) intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy for HIV-positive women. While sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine used as intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) is the standard drug for malaria prevention in pregnancy, HIV-positive women cannot take it due to risk of adverse drug reactions following interactions with other medications. Recent evidence suggests alternative treatments, such as dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine, may be both safe and effective for this population.

The GDG meetings have formulated the relevant recommendations, currently being finalized by WHO and expected for publication in June 2026. Without our funding, we think that WHO wouldn’t have the capacity to review the evidence for these programs for several years.

GiveWell’s malaria team also recently launched a request for information, similar to recent RFIs from other GiveWell research teams. The team is looking for organizations that are able to cost-effectively implement interventions that are not currently widely implemented, such as perennial malaria chemoprevention (PMC) or technical assistance to increase routine delivery of nets. Based on the prior success of our water RFI, whose more than 200 applications led to 18 grants, we are optimistic that this approach will lead to promising opportunities that we may not otherwise have found.

***

For more than a decade, GiveWell has been at the forefront of malaria prevention. As our team grows, we’re now able to move from funding existing programs to finding answers to important questions about the evidence, increasing coverage of life-saving programs, and supporting research on potential new ways to help people. We’ve taken on the challenge of reducing deaths from malaria in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago, and we’re excited to continue expanding this work.

The post Growing GiveWell’s Largest Research Area: Malaria appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Why We’re Funding the Search for New Water Innovations

Unsafe water results in more than 750,000 deaths each year, most of them in Africa and Asia.¹Our World in Data, “Deaths by Risk Factor, World, 2023.” Though water is a newer cause area at GiveWell, we’ve directed more than $150 million to water quality interventions since 2022. As our research capacity continues to grow, so does our ability to explore new opportunities to prevent deaths through safe water access.

We encourage organizations with water quality and access projects to apply to the DIV Fund, which we hope will surface promising programs that we can evaluate for future funding. We are particularly interested in water quality programs, as we believe this is where donors’ contributions can save and improve lives the most.

GiveWell has historically focused its water funding on chlorination programs, and we remain confident that these are among the most cost-effective water interventions available. We also hope this support to the DIV Fund helps reveal a wider breadth of high-impact water opportunities where we can direct donations.

About the DIV Fund’s Request for Proposals

The DIV Fund is an evidence-driven innovation fund for global development that tests and scales cost-effective solutions. While the DIV Fund’s RFP is open to all sectors, GiveWell’s $5 million grant is specifically funding selected water innovations and will be allocated over three years. The DIV Fund will be making all final funding decisions.

The DIV Fund will review all applications based on three core principles.

1. Evidence of impact: Applicants must present a credible theory of change grounded in existing evidence, as well as a plan to gather evidence of impact as they request higher funding amounts.
2. Cost-effectiveness: Applicants should be clear about both the assumptions underlying their cost projections and the evidence behind their impact estimates.
3. Durable scale: Applicants should have the potential to generate impact at scale and a clear path to lasting financial sustainability.

The DIV Fund uses a tiered funding approach, providing smaller amounts to early-stage innovations and larger awards to innovations with strong evidence supporting them.

• Stage 1 grants are up to $200,000 and support real-world pilots of innovations that are early in their development. By the end of Stage 1, grantees should be able to clearly show whether the innovation works in practice, if people will use it, and if it shows enough promise to warrant deeper investment.
• Stage 2 grants are up to $500,000 and are designed to determine if an innovation with successful pilot testing measurably and meaningfully improves people’s lives and has a viable path toward scale. By the end of Stage 2, grantees should be able to demonstrate if the innovation significantly improves lives, is cost-effective, and has a clear model for scaling.
• Stage 3 grants are up to $1.5 million and support the transition of proven innovations from piloting and testing to widespread scale. By the end of Stage 3, the innovation should demonstrate that it can achieve sustained impact at scale.

Please read the RFP in full if you are interested in applying.

Following the success of our water chlorination RFI last year, we’re excited about the potential of this grant and collaboration with the DIV Fund to help us scale our search for highly cost-effective opportunities to help communities lacking access to safe water.

The post Building our Safe Water Grantmaking: Apply to the DIV Fund’s RFP appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Looking Back to Give Better

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, our growing research capacity has enabled us to expand this work and publish comprehensive “lookbacks” for select grants.

Our latest podcast episode illustrates why this matters. In 2021, we made a grant to Fortify Health, an organization that works to reduce anemia by partnering with wheat flour mills in India to fortify their products with iron, folic acid, and vitamin B12. We had supported Fortify Health through two smaller grants in 2018 and 2019, but we weren’t sure if the program could reach sufficient scale to meet our cost-effectiveness funding threshold. By 2021, our best guess was that if the program continued to grow, it would likely meet that threshold.

After conducting a lookback analysis to understand how the 2021 grant performed relative to our initial estimates, we found that the program was far more cost-effective than we originally estimated. Fortify Health had grown its fortified flour production 30-fold, reached more people than projected, and spent significantly less than budgeted. Based on this exciting finding, we recently renewed our support to Fortify Health with a $10 million two-year grant. The lookback also gave us a way to assess why we had underestimated the likely impact of the 2021 grant and to improve our processes so we can make better estimates in the future.

Lookbacks are a relatively new process for GiveWell—we published our first lookbacks in 2025 and have now built them into our ongoing research processes. To learn about this recent expansion of our work, join us for our upcoming webinar, Looking Back to Give Better: How GiveWell Evaluates Its Grantmaking, on Tuesday, June 9, with Elie and Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller. They’ll walk through the methodology behind lookbacks, share findings from our grant evaluations so far, and answer audience questions. Register here.

GiveWell CEO Named to TIME100 Philanthropy List

GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld was recently named to the 2026 TIME100 Philanthropy list. Last year, GiveWell directed over $400 million to programs that save and improve lives, guided by the central question that has driven us from the very beginning—where can a dollar do the most good?

Read Elie’s full profile, and see the full TIME100 Philanthropy list.

Behind the Analysis: Assessing Past Malaria Nets Grants

A recent lookback on grants GiveWell made to fund insecticide-treated net distributions supported by the Against Malaria Foundation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is one of our most thorough yet. 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 our recent podcast episode, based on a conversation originally aired on GiveWell’s internal podcast for staff, GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld, Chief Research and Program Officer Teryn Mattox, Program Director Alex Cohen, and Researcher Steven Brownstone examine how we conducted the lookback, what we found, and how what we learned may shape our future nets grantmaking.

Elie, Teryn, Alex, and Steven discuss:

• A more expansive approach to evaluating past grants: This lookback draws on three independent quantitative sources—Against Malaria Foundation’s monitoring data, a recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) conducted in the DRC, and an original survey commissioned by GiveWell—alongside qualitative research from interviews of people involved in all aspects of DRC’s net distribution system.
• Our novel mortality analysis using DHS microdata: Because net campaigns roll out on staggered schedules across DRC’s provinces, we used the timing of children’s births relative to the date of local net campaigns as a natural experiment. We found that the net campaigns reduced the risk of death by around a quarter.
• What qualitative research revealed: Interviewers asked people across five provinces in DRC whether households received nets and were using nets—and if not, why not. Although we heard some anecdotes of misuse or diversion, the data suggested that nets are generally highly valued by the communities receiving them.

Read our episode summary for more, and subscribe to be notified of our newest episodes.

New RFI: Malaria Pilot Programs and Research

Submissions due June 24

We recently launched a new request for information to expand and strengthen our malaria grantmaking in Africa. GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion in donations to malaria prevention programs to date. As our research capacity grows, we’re looking for new programs and research that can help prevent more deaths from malaria and help our donors make a greater impact.

Organizations can apply through one of two submission tracks:

1. Pilot programs focused on malaria chemoprevention and vector control
2. Research and evaluation with potential to improve GiveWell’s future grantmaking

We hope to reach as many organizations as possible. Please share with your network and consider applying! Learn more and apply here.

Grant Spotlight

Our grantmaking supports programs and research that aim to save and improve lives the most per dollar. Here’s a look at one recent example:

Where: Malawi, Mozambique, and Uganda
What: Pilots of three variations of GiveDirectly’s standard cash transfer program
Who: GiveDirectly
Amount: $4.6 million
How it works: This grant will test three different approaches to increasing the impact of cash transfers:
1. In Malawi, pairing small grants to local businesses with household cash transfers so vendors can stock up to meet new demand
2. In Mozambique, targeting the poorest young adults with cash transfers since they may be more likely to start a business or build assets
3. In Uganda, timing cash transfers to coincide with the construction of new footbridges so recipients can access markets more easily
Why this grant: GiveDirectly’s standard cash transfer program currently falls below our cost-effectiveness threshold for livelihoods interventions, but it has a proven ability to scale. We funded these pilots to test whether specific adaptations to the program could meet our cost-effectiveness threshold.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund

To learn more, check out the grant page.

Hiring Announcements

Featured Role: Senior Researchers
We’re hiring Senior Researchers across three of GiveWell’s grantmaking teams—Water, Vaccination, and Livelihoods—to help direct hundreds of millions of dollars to highly cost-effective global health and development programs.

• Senior Water Researcher: Our water portfolio is beginning to pivot from a narrow focus on chlorination toward a broader exploration of the water sector. Lead research on water quality interventions, clean water delivery models, water access programs, and more.
• Senior Vaccination Researcher: Shape one of our fastest-growing portfolios—from $12 million in 2024 to $70+ million expected in 2026. Research routine immunization coverage, demand-side incentives, malaria vaccine rollout, and potentially new areas like surveillance and outbreak response.
• Senior Livelihoods Researcher: Tackle questions about cash transfers, social protection programs, education programs, and support for small businesses in low-income countries. Help us understand why large-scale livelihoods programs haven’t always moved the needle on reducing poverty rates.

We’re also hiring a Senior Cross-Cutting Researcher to work on the thorniest methodological questions that cut across all of GiveWell’s research, including how we think about cost-effectiveness, uncertainty, and impact. Our Cross-Cutting team works across all program areas and serves as an internal check on our reasoning.

Partner Roundup

• See how New Incentives’ coverage monitoring tracks their program’s reach across northern Nigeria.
• Explore how Giving What We Can connects Peter Singer’s “drowning child” thought experiment to the evidence behind effective giving today.
• Read Malaria Consortium’s case for why strong surveillance is essential to sustaining and accelerating progress against malaria.

Comments or Questions?

We’re always looking for fresh perspectives on our research. If you have comments or questions on our work, we want to hear from you! Reach out to us at info@givewell.org.

The post May 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Because of the large number of people affected and the low cost to provide people with iron, we are evaluating additional iron fortification and supplementation programs to potentially increase our grantmaking in this area. At the same time, it has been difficult to determine exactly how much providing people with additional iron improves their lives. GiveWell’s growing research capacity is allowing us to study the programs we’ve funded and to support new research, then to use what we learn to continue improving our funding decisions.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Researcher Andrew Martin about GiveWell’s work on iron: why the evidence is more complicated than it might seem, what we’ve learned from years of funding iron programs, and what’s ahead.

Elie and Andrew discuss:

• The evidence for iron: Anemia is a significant problem, but it can be hard to determine the exact magnitude of the benefit that comes from addressing it. In addition, current definitions of anemia, which can be caused by iron deficiency, are based on statistical data about typical hemoglobin levels rather than on people’s symptoms. GiveWell is supporting a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh that aims to address this by measuring how providing additional iron affects perceived fatigue and other health outcomes—helping determine measurable thresholds at which people experience significant symptoms. We think the findings could reshape our understanding of how anemia affects people’s lives and improve our anemia-related grantmaking.
• Looking back at Fortify Health’s progress: Fortify Health partners with wheat flour mills in India to fortify flour with iron and other micronutrients. After earlier grants to Fortify Health providing general support, GiveWell made a larger $8.2 million grant in 2021. At the time GiveWell made this grant, Fortify Health was working with seven mills and reaching roughly 350,000 people per year. Over the next three years, it expanded to 125 open-market mills producing more than 30 times more flour (see chart below) at about half the cost per person reached of our original estimate. We now estimate that our 2021 grant was about twice as cost-effective as we initially projected. Based on this track record, we recently renewed our support to Fortify Health with a $10 million two-year grant.

• What’s next for GiveWell’s research into iron: GiveWell currently supports two iron programs in India: Fortify Health’s work expanding iron fortification of wheat flour and Evidence Action’s iron and folic acid supplementation program for children. To date, GiveWell has not funded iron fortification or supplementation programs in Africa, despite the region’s high anemia burden, in part because of concerns about potential harm from iron interventions in high-malaria settings. To help expand our work in this area, we issued a request for information for iron programs earlier this year—focusing on lower-malaria contexts—and are currently evaluating responses. We’re also considering support for historical research studying countries that have introduced fortification programs to help assess the long-term income effects of providing iron.

GiveWell’s research on iron supplementation and fortification programs exemplifies this moment in GiveWell’s evolution: The research capacity and track record we’ve built are now enabling us to assess past grants, build and evaluate the evidence base, and expand our support of new cost-effective ways to help people in need.

Visit our All Grants Fund page to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for our latest updates.

This episode was recorded on May 15, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Podcast Episode 30: What a Decade of Iron Funding Has Taught Us appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.