In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher Stephan Guyenet about the evidence base for vitamin A supplementation, the complications in applying that evidence to our funding decisions, and how GiveWell has improved our cost-effectiveness estimates for the program.

Elie and Stephan discuss:

• The evidence base for vitamin A supplementation: Evidence from rigorous trials shows that vitamin A supplementation can significantly reduce child mortality. However, most of these trials were conducted 30 to 40 years ago, when infectious disease rates and vitamin A deficiency were more prevalent, and a more recent large trial in India found a much smaller effect. As a result, we worked to resolve our uncertainties about the effect of vitamin A supplementation in the contexts where we’re supporting it today.
• How GiveWell worked through the complications: To address our questions about the existing evidence, we engaged in further research. This included an analysis focused on the specific diseases for which vitamin A supplementation reduces mortality, a novel dosing-frequency analysis conducted in consultation with an outside statistician, and an assessment of possible publication bias.
• What all of this means for grantmaking: While the trials report that vitamin A supplementation reduces the risk of death by 19% on average in children 6 to 59 months old, we estimate that the impact in the modern settings we model is smaller: a 1% to 11% lower risk of death. Nevertheless, we still think vitamin A supplementation can be highly cost-effective. Using our updated cost-effectiveness analysis, we estimate our most recent grant for vitamin A supplementation to Helen Keller Intl is 25 times more cost-effective than our benchmark. This change reflects our more precise, location-specific analyses that allows us to direct funding to places where vitamin A supplementation is likely to be the most cost-effective.

GiveWell continues to scrutinize the programs we fund, including those we have supported for years. In this case, years of rigorous research have largely held up the case for vitamin A supplementation. We are continuing to review the program, funding new research to address remaining uncertainties and exploring whether a new randomized trial might be feasible. By doing so, we’ll continue to increase our confidence and refine our funding decisions to target the most cost-effective locations and do the most good we can with donors’ funds.

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 March 25, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Podcast Episode 27: Scrutinizing One of Our Longest-Funded Programs appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Our 2025 Grant Investigation Survey Results

When we investigate potential grants, we work closely with implementing organizations—gathering data, asking detailed questions, and assessing cost-effectiveness. Sometimes this results in us making a grant, and other times it doesn’t, but we want to ensure our process always reflects our core values of truth-seeking and transparency. So, for the second year in a row, we sent an anonymous survey to find out how we’re doing.

The survey was sent to organizations that participated in our grant investigation process from April 2024 through July 2025. We invited 122 individuals representing 75 organizations to participate—more than double last year’s sample—and we received 80 responses (a 66% response rate). Included in the total were 22 contacts from investigations that did not result in a grant, from which we received five responses.

The results were encouraging: overall satisfaction rose from 4.2 to 4.6 out of 5, with particularly high marks for honest communication and treating organizations as experts in their work. We also saw new themes emerge this year. Several respondents said they gained value from GiveWell beyond funding, through shared data from similar programs, connections to other implementers, and monitoring and evaluation guidance. Others appreciated our responsiveness during the US foreign aid freeze and resulting uncertainty.

The survey also pointed to areas we need to improve, including being clearer about why we’re asking for specific information, doing more to share what we’re learning with partners, and building a mutual understanding of monitoring and evaluation best practices. We’re actively working on these areas and plan to conduct the survey again in 2026 to track our progress. To learn more, check out our blog post.

Investing in Information for Greater Future Impact

In addition to our core grantmaking, GiveWell is funding an increasing number of grants designed to generate information that will help us direct more funding to highly cost-effective programs in the future. In 2025, we made 18 grants totaling approximately $39 million aimed specifically at improving future funding decisions.

In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Julie Faller about these “value of information” grants.

Elie and Julie cover:

• Testing variations on cash transfers to improve cost-effectiveness: GiveWell funded GiveDirectly to pilot three variations of its flagship cash transfer program: grants to local businesses, targeted transfers to the poorest young adults, and pairing transfers with footbridge construction. The pilots will help us learn which approaches increase economic impact, potentially leading to more opportunities to help people in need.
• Testing a delivery model for diarrhea treatment: To explore whether door-to-door delivery could increase uptake of oral rehydration solution—an inexpensive, effective treatment for diarrhea-related dehydration—GiveWell funded a large randomized controlled trial with the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Bauchi, Nigeria. Initial results are promising, and we’re now considering whether to fund this model at scale.
• Collecting better data on a nutrition program in India: Fortify Health works to address widespread anemia in India by partnering with flour millers to fortify wheat flour with iron. GiveWell funded a household survey in six Indian cities to better understand how much fortified flour people are actually consuming, helping resolve some uncertainty about the program’s cost-effectiveness and inform our decision to renew funding.

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

Following the Data on Dispensers for Safe Water

As our research team has grown, we’ve become better able to collect and analyze data on how our grants are performing. When early data on Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water program suggested it might not be reaching as many people as estimated, we dug in deeper—funding independent surveys, supported by donations to the All Grants Fund, to understand why.

In a recent podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett discuss what the surveys revealed, how we changed course, and what those findings mean for our broader approach to monitoring.

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: Niger State and Bauchi State, Nigeria
What: Vitamin A supplementation (VAS) to reduce childhood deaths from infectious disease, delivered alongside preventative malaria medication campaigns
Who: Malaria Consortium
Amount: $410,000 top-up, totaling $1.8 million
How it works: This grant supports the delivery of VAS alongside Malaria Consortium’s existing door-to-door seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) campaigns, reaching children aged 6 to 59 months with two life-saving interventions at once for a very low additional cost.
Why this grant: We originally recommended a $1.4 million grant to Malaria Consortium in October 2023 to layer VAS onto existing SMC campaigns as a cost-effective model for reaching children at scale. In May 2025, we learned that the VAS + SMC campaign was at risk after SMC budgets were reduced. We recommended the $410,000 top-up grant to allow Malaria Consortium to proceed with the campaign in Niger State as planned.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund and an individual donation

To learn more, check out the grant page.

Partner Roundup

• Learn how a health worker in Madagascar is overcoming barriers to reach children with vitamin A through Helen Keller Intl’s program.
• Celebrate New Incentives’ 2025 impact—more than 1.8 million infants enrolled and over 9 million cash incentives disbursed for childhood vaccinations in Nigeria.
• Meet an SMC supervisor in Togo who helps ensure children receive preventative malaria medication during seasonal campaigns through Malaria Consortium.

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 March 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We’ve been able to take an even more expansive view as our research team doubled in size over the last several years. In addition to our core grantmaking, we’re now 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 things like generating research about program effectiveness, scoping new promising programs, and piloting program variations.

GiveWell has long made some grants aimed at improving our knowledge base, but this work has now grown substantially and become more systematic. In 2025, GiveWell made 18 grants, totaling approximately $39 million, that were aimed specifically at getting more information to improve future funding decisions. In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Julie Faller about these “value of information” grants.

Elie and Julie discuss:

• Testing variations on cash transfers to improve cost-effectiveness: Following an initial scoping grant, GiveWell recently funded GiveDirectly to pilot three program variations aimed at increasing the economic impact of its flagship program, which provides unconditional cash transfers to very poor households. Each pilot tests a different approach to increasing impact: one provides grants to local businesses ahead of a cash transfer rollout, another targets transfers to the poorest young adults, and the third pairs transfers with footbridge construction to help remote communities access markets and services. Through these pilots, we expect to learn more about the feasibility and potential cost-effectiveness of the program variations, potentially leading to opportunities to help people in need even more.
• Testing a delivery model for diarrhea treatment: Oral rehydration solution—an inexpensive, effective treatment for diarrhea-related dehydration—is used by far fewer children than could benefit from it. To explore whether door-to-door delivery could increase uptake, GiveWell funded a large randomized controlled trial with the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Bauchi, Nigeria. Initial results are promising, indicating that 3,000 community distributors were able to reach about 80% of households with young children—and that ORS usage increased as a result. GiveWell is now considering whether to fund this model at scale, potentially with multiple implementers.
• Collecting better data on a nutrition program in India: GiveWell has supported Fortify Health, which works to address widespread anemia in India by partnering with flour millers to fortify wheat flour with iron. GiveWell recently funded a household survey in six Indian cities to better understand how much fortified flour people are actually consuming, and who in the household is eating it. The survey provided more information about several parameters that, taken together, allowed us to resolve some uncertainty about the program’s cost-effectiveness. We used what we learned to inform our decision to renew funding for the program.

These examples reflect a longer-term shift at GiveWell—from an organization that primarily evaluated existing programs to one that increasingly generates the evidence needed to improve its grantmaking and fund more impactful programs in the future.

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 March 13, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Podcast Episode 26: Investing in Information for Greater Future Impact appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

In July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. While we typically ask for candid, live feedback from the organizations we work with, we had not previously invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process. The survey sought to better understand the extent to which we live out our values in our interactions with external organizations. The questions focused on organizations’ experiences with our grant investigation process and post-grant follow-up.

In 2025, we repeated the process with the same survey instrument and compared results to the prior year, to see what had changed and whether our daily work is reflecting our core values and operating principles.

GiveWell’s second annual grant investigation survey was sent to organizations that participated in our grant investigation process from April 2024 through July 2025.¹We sent the same survey in two segments, one in February 2025 and one in September 2025. We invited a total of 122 individuals representing 75 organizations to participate, and we received 80 responses (66% response rate). Included in the total were 22 contacts from investigations that did not result in a grant, from which we received five responses.

What we learned

This year’s respondents rated their satisfaction with GiveWell’s investigation process higher than last year’s respondents: 4.6 out of 5 in 2025 compared to 4.2 out of 5 in 2024. Among the survey questions, GiveWell received particularly high scores for honest, professional, and transparent communication, and for showing respect to organizations and treating them as experts in their field.

While the response rates of the 2024 and 2025 surveys were similar—58% in 2024 compared to 66% in 2025—the sample size for the 2025 survey was substantially larger: 80 in 2025 compared to 32 in 2024. The larger sample size is largely a result of GiveWell’s rapidly increasing grant volume: we invited more than twice as many people to respond in the 2025 survey, one for each grant investigation we completed.

In addition to improvements in several areas, including overall satisfaction and satisfaction with the length of our grant investigations,²The average rating for satisfaction with the length of our investigations was 4.1 in 2025 compared to 3.8 in 2024; this remains a relative weak point. we noted two new themes in the 2025 results. First, five respondents (~6%) proactively reported gaining value from GiveWell and its network beyond funding or programmatic suggestions. This included instances where GiveWell shared data from similar programs, made suggestions based on monitoring and evaluation best practices, and connected organizations with experts or other implementers. Second, nine respondents (~11%) added comments expressing appreciation for GiveWell’s flexibility, speed, and responsiveness to the US aid freeze, cuts, and resulting uncertainty.

Additionally, the survey results indicate several key areas where we can continue to improve our grant investigation process, which we are actively working to address:

• Ensuring that we clearly communicate why we are asking for information and how the information will be used. This includes how information may impact our cost-effectiveness estimates, what we expect to learn from the grant, or how the information will feed into our qualitative decisions.
• Proactively finding more ways to share our knowledge with implementing organizations and to connect implementing organizations to each other, with subject matter experts, and with others in the field.
• Sharing what we’ve learned from monitoring and evaluation data with partners and building a shared understanding of best practices.
• Continuing to identify high-impact funding opportunities through requests for proposals and open funding calls (for example, our request for information for water chlorination programs), which are newer mechanisms for GiveWell.

Our next steps

We plan to conduct the survey again in 2026 and to collect feedback through other methods to identify areas for improvement. This will allow us to compare trends over time and look for patterns related to the size of grants, research areas, or other characteristics.

As we look to the future, we will keep working to improve GiveWell by refining our research, collecting information from people who live and work in the countries where we fund programs, and gathering feedback from the organizations carrying out those programs. All of these efforts are aimed at our core mission: delivering more impact to help those in need as much as we can, now and in years to come.

The post GiveWell’s 2025 Grant Investigation Survey Results appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

But our work doesn’t stop there. When a program we’ve supported nears the end of their funding, we also regularly evaluate its results to decide whether to continue our support. This typically involves gathering and analyzing extensive monitoring data. In most cases, the results are consistent with what we expected, and we renew the programs’ support. But sometimes we decide that, even if a program is doing a lot of good, it may not be having the impact we expected. In that case, we decide not to renew our support and instead direct those funds to where we think they’ll do much more good for people in need.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett about the research that led GiveWell not to renew support for Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water—a program that installs chlorine dispensers at rural water points so that households can treat their drinking water and reduce waterborne disease—in Malawi and Uganda.

Elie and Erin discuss:

• How independent data revealed a significant gap in program reach: Early signals from a separate GiveWell-funded study and Evidence Action’s own internal review of the program in Kenya suggested chlorination rates were far lower than routine monitoring indicated. GiveWell then commissioned an independent survey in Uganda and Malawi to find out whether the same was true there. The survey found that only about a third as many people were using dispensers as previously estimated: roughly 2 million rather than 5 million.
• Potential reasons for the data discrepancy: We believe that no single error drove the discrepancy. Instead, there were five or six contributing issues that together caused the differences in estimated usage. For example, chlorine was measured by matching a test result to a color wheel, which can be subjective and affected by lighting. This data was collected by Evidence Action’s own staff, which may have led them to interpret the color wheel results more favorably.
• What GiveWell learned and its effect on future grantmaking: We believe that approving the initial grant in 2022 was the right decision, given what we knew at the time. We also think that we could have done better by, for example, investing earlier in independent verification. We now apply these lessons to our current grantmaking. For instance, our recent portfolio of safe water grants includes external surveys for all grants.

As we’ve developed and grown our research team over the past several years, we’ve become increasingly able to support additional data collection, analyze and learn from our grants, and reallocate resources to the most cost-effective global health and development needs we find.

Getting things right requires both honest self-assessment and grantee partners willing to open themselves to scrutiny, and we are grateful for Evidence Action’s partnership in identifying the discrepancy in usage rates. Evidence Action is now reducing its footprint in Uganda and Kenya, and winding down the program in Malawi, with a 24-month transition to help support communities and turn over operations to the governments where possible.

Dispensers for Safe Water is still a program that helps people, and our grant provided clean water to millions. GiveWell’s decision not to renew reflects our mission to direct donor funds to where they will do the most good—not to fund everything that does good. We are continuing to support chlorine dispensers in contexts where we believe they will be highly cost-effective. For instance, we are currently considering a grant to Evidence Action to pilot variations of the program in northern Nigeria, where disease burden is much higher than the countries where we had been funding the program—and therefore the impact per dollar might pass our high bar for funding.

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 February 20, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

The chlorine content in water is measured by matching the color on the color wheel (in the outer viewing window) to the color of the water sample (in the inner viewing window). The tester spins the wheel to change the color visible in the window; when the colors match, the tester reads the chlorine concentration in the lower viewing window. This process is subjective, as lighting and background colors can affect the reading.

The post Podcast Episode 25: Following the Data on Dispensers for Safe Water appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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GiveWell’s 2025 Grantmaking

Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we find.

Last year’s grantmaking reflects this growth: Between February 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, GiveWell approved $418 million in grants to save and improve lives as much as we can. This funding was directed via 131 grants to 69 organizations—more than double the number of grants and double the number of organizations from the prior year.

In our recent blog post, we look back at the numbers behind our 2025 grantmaking, and ahead to the ways we’ll continue scaling our work with donors this year.

Our growing research team is increasingly able to find a wider variety of highly impactful programs and cause areas to support in global health and development. GiveWell grants in 2025 supported programs across a range of cause areas in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Malaria prevention and treatment was the largest area of our grantmaking over the last year, followed by vaccination programs, malnutrition treatment, and programs to provide safe water.

We’re grateful for the more than 30,000 donors whose generosity allowed us to direct funding in 2025 to highly cost-effective programs. In 2026, we plan to grant at least $500 million—and continue strengthening our team, systems, and processes to help people in need even more in the future.

Testing New Strategies to Increase Vaccination Coverage

GiveWell has long recognized the potential for highly cost-effective vaccine programs. We started supporting vaccination programs in 2015 and have made over $200 million in vaccination-related grants to date. Over the past several years, we’ve been laying the groundwork to expand the scope of our work and funding.

In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Natalie Crispin to discuss how our research approach has evolved and what it means for helping more children access life-saving vaccinations.

Elie and Natalie cover:

• Moving from finding programs to solving problems: In the past, GiveWell primarily looked for specific, evidence-backed program types to support—such as conditional cash transfers that incentivize vaccination. Now, with a dedicated vaccines team, we ask a bigger question: What are the bottlenecks that prevent children from getting vaccinated and how can we address them?
• Building a grantmaking portfolio to maximize learning: We’ve recently funded several vaccination outreach programs and plan to fund more in differing contexts this year, which will give us the opportunity to learn quickly about what is most cost effective and direct future funding accordingly.
• Expanding capacity through specialization: Over the past three years, GiveWell’s research team has doubled in size and its structure has changed. Today, nearly 60 researchers now work on cause-specific teams—including one focused on vaccination—enabling deeper relationships with implementers, funders, and government officials.

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

Generating Evidence for the Future of Malaria Prevention

Seasonal malaria chemoprevention is one of the most cost-effective programs GiveWell has identified—but we have substantial uncertainties about drug effectiveness in eastern and southern Africa. That’s why we’re funding the CHAMP trial, which is, to our knowledge, the largest individually randomized trial of malaria chemoprevention drugs ever conducted.

In a recent podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Senior Researcher John Macke discuss what we hope to learn and how it could shape our malaria grantmaking.

GiveWell at SMC Alliance + Alliance for Malaria Prevention Joint Meetings

GiveWell staff have been expanding their networks by regularly attending conferences and talking with government officials, other funders, and implementing organizations. As part of this effort, much of GiveWell’s malaria research team traveled to Uganda last week to attend the Joint Meetings of the SMC Alliance and the Alliance for Malaria Prevention happening this week in Kampala, Uganda.

In the photo above, GiveWell Senior Program Officer Marinella Capriati discusses malaria funding with government officials and other funders on a panel at the conference. We expect to use what we’ve learned and the relationships we’ve built to strengthen our grantmaking, allowing us to help people in need even more.

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: Far North Cameroon
What: Healthcare and malnutrition treatment for a high-mortality population (pregnant women and children under five) across 16 facilities in a conflict-affected region
Who: Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA)
Amount: $1.9 million
How it works: ALIMA supports government health facilities by providing essential medical supplies and equipment, paying salaries for doctors and nurses, and operating specialized treatment programs. The program delivers a range of proven interventions, from antimalarials to acute malnutrition treatment, and trains local staff in evidence-based protocols for improving health outcomes.
Why this grant: This was a time-sensitive grant after USAID funding was suddenly cancelled, putting some of ALIMA’s critical services at risk of shutting down. The grant prevented that imminent collapse, ensuring care continued for a high-mortality population where ALIMA provides about two-thirds of the trained medical staff and runs essential services, like the region’s only neonatal unit.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund

To learn more, check out the grant page.

Partner Roundup

• Read about the work Helen Keller Intl is doing to make a meaningful impact in 2026.
• See how door-to-door delivery of seasonal malaria chemoprevention (supported by Malaria Consortium) changed one family’s life for the better.
• Learn how fathers in northern Nigeria are increasingly taking an active role in getting their children vaccinated through New Incentives’ program.

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 February 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

The first RFI seeks organizations that would like to implement targeted vaccination outreach or mobile vaccination programs in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, or Somalia. The second seeks programs that reduce iron deficiency anemia through large-scale food fortification, targeted iron supplementation, and iron biofortification in Africa.

These RFIs are just one component of our expanding efforts to find and fund high-impact ways to help people in need. We’re making them public in an effort to reach as many organizations as possible, and we encourage you to share them with your networks. Submissions for both RFIs are due March 27.

Targeted vaccination outreach and mobile vaccination

GiveWell started supporting vaccination programs in 2015 and has made over $200 million in vaccination-related grants to date. Our vaccination team is especially interested in finding ways to make it easier for caregivers to have their children vaccinated, such as by bringing vaccines closer to where parents and infants are. We think that vaccination programs like these are likely to be highly cost-effective because vaccines substantially reduce child mortality and these programs may be able to reach children who have been missed by other approaches. We also believe they have a high potential to scale.

For this RFI, we are only seeking applications for programs that meet the following criteria:

• Routine childhood immunizations: Programs should aim to increase uptake of the bundle of vaccinations that are routinely scheduled for children under two years of age in the program context;¹For example, if a program plans to work in an area in DRC where the malaria vaccine has been introduced, we would expect the program to target uptake of the malaria vaccine and all other vaccines that are part of the routine schedule for children under two. we do not plan to consider proposals for programs that deliver a single vaccine (e.g., outbreak-specific campaigns).
• Locations: Programs should operate in select areas of DRC, Nigeria, or Somalia.
  • Eligible provinces in DRC: Kasaï, Kwilu, Lomami, Sankuru
  • Eligible states in Nigeria: Sokoto and Zamfara
  • Eligible regions in Somalia: All
• Program type: “Targeted outreach” and/or mobile vaccination programs should both (1) identify undervaccinated communities, and (2) facilitate regular provision of vaccination services to those communities.²In Francophone countries, these programs are often referred to as “stratégie avancée/advanced strategy” or “stratégie mobile,” depending on the distance to the nearest health facility. Both of those program types are eligible for this RFI; when we say “outreach” and “mobile vaccination” we don’t have specific requirements in mind on the distance at which these vaccination sessions would take place.
• Scale: Programs should serve areas where at least 40,000 children are born each year. Grants will fund activities for two to three years.

We’ve recently made a few grants that support programs like this. For example, in July 2025, we approved a grant to Malaria Consortium to implement a community-based mobile vaccination program targeting remote areas in South Sudan. In January 2026, we approved a grant to PATH to work with local officials in Kebbi state, Nigeria, to develop microplans identifying hard-to-reach communities, then hire, train, and deploy mobile immunization teams to conduct monthly vaccination outreaches to those communities.

We’re excited about these grants and would like to fund even more programs like them to increase the uptake of routine childhood vaccinations. By funding similar programs across a variety of implementers and geographies, we’re also hoping to learn more about the conditions under which this type of program can be highly cost-effective.

Iron fortification, supplementation, and biofortification

Since 2017, GiveWell has made over $41 million in grants for iron fortification and supplementation programs, mostly in India. We are now exploring whether similar programs could be cost-effective in Africa and are seeking expressions of interest from organizations implementing or positioned to implement these programs, either as pilots or at scale. We’re interested in funding programs in areas where iron deficiency anemia is prevalent and malaria prevalence is low enough that we believe programs can be delivered safely and cost-effectively.³Due to evidence of lower effectiveness and potential harms from iron interventions in high-malaria settings, particularly for young children, we are not considering programs in countries where national malaria prevalence exceeds 20% in children aged two to nine years old. As a result, the following countries are not eligible for this RFI: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Togo, Uganda. All other African countries are eligible, though we expect to prioritize larger geographies where programs have greater potential to scale. We are also open to multi-country interventions. Programs should be designed to operate on an ongoing basis; we are not considering one-time distribution campaigns.

For this RFI, the following programs are of particular interest:

• Large-scale food fortification programs: We plan to prioritize large-scale food fortification programs, as we consider these programs, which work with food processors to add iron (and potentially other micronutrients) to staple foods, to be the most promising. Key activities might include providing technical assistance to mills or government programs, supplying premix or equipment, quality assurance and testing, and monitoring consumption of fortified products.
• Iron supplementation programs: We are interested in programs that distribute iron supplements to at-risk populations. Key activities might include procuring and distributing supplements, training for delivery personnel, providing technical assistance, and tracking coverage and adherence. Given evidence of reduced effectiveness and potential harms from supplementation in young children in high-malaria settings, we are particularly interested in:
  • Programs targeting adolescent girls or women of reproductive age, as these populations may benefit from iron supplementation and are at lower risk of malaria-related harm.
  • Programs targeting school-aged children (5-19 years), following WHO guidelines for supplementation in this age group.
• Biofortification programs: We aim to support programs that involve developing or distributing crops bred for higher iron content, such as iron-biofortified beans or maize.

The post GiveWell Launches RFIs for Targeted Vaccination Outreach in Three Countries and Anemia Control Programs in Africa appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Between February 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, GiveWell approved 131 grants to 69 organizations—the most grants we’ve made in a year so far. This post provides an overview of the kinds of grants we made and the impact we had last year. This was only possible thanks to the generosity of our donors. We’re incredibly grateful for the trust you place in our research and for your partnership in trying to do the most good we can together.

Increased Grantmaking

In 2025, we launched more than 200 formal grant investigations, after reviewing many additional promising opportunities. Tens of thousands of hours went into this research, which resulted in 131 approved grants. This is more than double the number of grants we approved during 2024, and resulted in a year-over-year increase of more than 20% in total grantmaking dollars.

Double Our Cost-Effectiveness Threshold

In 2025, we generally considered funding opportunities that our research estimated to be at least 8x our cost-effectiveness benchmark. Overall, we estimate that the average cost-effectiveness of the money spent across all our grants was approximately double that: 16x our benchmark.

You can see a more detailed breakdown of our grant dollars by cost-effectiveness in the figure below, which excludes some smaller grants for which we did not create a formal cost-effectiveness estimate.

Expanded Cause Areas and Reach

While GiveWell is often known for its Top Charities, we’ve been substantially broadening our work over the last several years as part of our mission to help people in need as much as we can. Of our total 2025 grant funding, $309 million was allocated to highly cost-effective programs other than our Top Charities. As this shift shows, our growing research team is increasingly able to find a wider variety of highly impactful programs and cause areas to support.

Malaria prevention and treatment was the largest area of our grantmaking over the last year, and we directed substantial funding to a growing number of other global health and development areas as well. You can see a full list of our 2025 grants on our website.

GiveWell grants in 2025 supported programs in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The largest number of grants supported programs in Nigeria, followed by India and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Urgent Response to Aid Cuts

Twenty-five grants, totaling about $53 million (13%) of grantmaking funds, directly addressed urgent and cost-effective needs created by cuts to US foreign aid, though most of our research and the programs we fund have been affected by the cuts in some way.

In order to have the greatest impact with our donors’ funds, we are focusing our response to foreign aid funding cuts on the most cost-effective opportunities we find, rather than trying to replace lost funding more generally. The grants we’ve approved used a wide variety of approaches, including direct program support, advisory support for governments, purchasing health supplies, and funding guarantees for programs that were not certain expected payments would come through. Most of this funding went to support malaria prevention and treatment, but it also covered needs we discovered in many other cause areas.

Continuing Our Growth in 2026 and Beyond

As our 2025 grantmaking demonstrates, we’re finding and funding a growing number and wider range of high-impact ways to help people—expanding our ability to support donors in giving effectively.

In 2026, we plan to continue strengthening our team, systems, and processes to enable us to help people in need even more. Our top priorities this year are to:

• Grant $500 million or more to cost-effective programs. We grew our team substantially last year, and we expect this additional capacity to enable us to direct more money cost-effectively.
• Build capacity to sustain increased fundraising and grantmaking. We need to keep strengthening our team and growing our capacity to research and fund more highly cost-effective ways to help in the future.

We’re grateful for the tens of thousands of donors whose generosity allowed us to direct funding to highly cost-effective programs this year to save and improve lives. Our researchers are already hard at work on our 2026 grants to help people in need!

The post GiveWell’s 2025 Grantmaking: Record Grants, Expanded Reach, Crisis Response appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

GiveWell has long recognized the potential for highly cost-effective vaccine programs. We started supporting vaccination programs in 2015 and have made over $200 million in vaccination-related grants to date. For example, New Incentives, one of our Top Charities, aims to increase routine childhood vaccinations in northern Nigeria by providing small cash incentives to caregivers who bring their children into clinics for vaccinations.

Over the past several years, we’ve been growing our research team and laying the groundwork to expand the scope of our work and funding.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Natalie Crispin, who leads GiveWell’s vaccination grantmaking. They discuss how our research approach has evolved and what it means for helping more children access life-saving vaccinations.

Elie and Natalie discuss:

• Moving from finding existing programs to targeting funding gaps: In the past, GiveWell primarily looked for specific, evidence-backed program types to support—such as conditional cash transfers that incentivize vaccination. Now, with a dedicated vaccines team, we ask a bigger question: What are the bottlenecks that prevent children from getting vaccinated and how can we address them? This shift has driven our funding in areas like vaccination outreach, where teams travel to remote communities to deliver vaccines.
• Building a grantmaking portfolio to maximize learning: GiveWell recently funded several vaccination outreach programs. For example, in DRC’s Kongo Central province, where vaccination coverage rates are low, we’re supporting planning vaccination sessions (e.g. timing, frequency, location) with better data, paying community health workers to track which children need vaccines, and funding motorbikes and fuel for vaccination teams to provide vaccination near communities who are far from health facilities. This year, we hope to fund a number of additional vaccination outreach and mobile vaccination programs in differing contexts. We expect this will provide the opportunity to learn quickly about what works and help us direct future funding accordingly.
• Expanding capacity through specialization: Over the past three years, GiveWell’s research team has doubled in size and its structure has changed. Today, nearly 60 researchers work on cause-specific teams, one of which focuses on vaccination. This specialization has enabled deeper relationships with vaccination implementers, funders, and government officials—relationships that have allowed us to surface new opportunities and better understand potential funding gaps.

GiveWell’s vaccination grantmaking is a longstanding area of focus with growing diversity and impact. The deepening expertise and novel approaches of that dedicated team illustrate how the research team as a whole has evolved to pursue opportunities we wouldn’t have been able to just a few years ago. With greater capacity and specialization across health areas, we’re now better positioned to identify and direct donations to highly cost-effective programs that save and improve lives.

Visit our Top Charities Fund and All Grants Fund pages 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 January 22, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Podcast Episode 24: Testing New Strategies to Increase Vaccination Coverage appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Most of our funding to date has supported programs in West Africa, where strong evidence gives us confidence in the effectiveness of the drug combination used. In eastern and southern Africa, malaria chemoprevention programs could potentially help many more children, but we have substantial uncertainties about drug effectiveness in that region.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher John Macke about the CHAMP trial, a randomized controlled trial of chemoprevention drugs we’re supporting in Malawi, and how it could shape our malaria grantmaking.

This research is one example of how GiveWell is building for the future: investing in research now that could substantially expand our ability to direct funding cost-effectively in the years ahead.

Elie and John discuss:

• Why eastern and southern Africa present different challenges: One of the drugs used in seasonal chemoprevention shows widespread resistance in the region, and existing trial evidence about the effectiveness of chemoprevention there has limitations. While we’ve supported SMC in parts of Uganda and Mozambique, we’ve been cautious about scaling up without stronger evidence on which drug combinations work and whether using certain drugs could increase resistance.
• What this trial will tell us: The trial will test three drugs alone and in different combinations across roughly 7,000 children in Malawi, making it, to our knowledge, the largest individually randomized trial of chemoprevention drugs ever conducted. We’ll learn about the efficacy of the two drugs currently used in SMC, as well as an additional drug that had previously shown resistance but might now be effective again. The trial will look at the effect of the drugs on both malaria infections and hospitalizations caused by malaria.
• How the results could affect our grantmaking: Depending on what we learn, this trial could open up more than $100 million in cost-effective funding opportunities for chemoprevention programs each year in eastern and southern Africa. The trial results will also provide a knowledge base for other funders and implementers to improve the cost-effectiveness of malaria programming. We expect initial results in mid- to late 2027, with the potential for resulting grants to provide medication to children in 2028-2029.

Visit our Top Charities Fund and All Grants Fund pages 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 January 22, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

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