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Working Toward $2.5 Billion in Malaria Grantmaking

GiveWell aims to direct at least $2.5 billion in new malaria funding from 2027 through 2032. This builds on GiveWell’s growth over the past five years as we’ve expanded the scale of our team and grantmaking. This year, we expect to direct more than $1 billion in donor funding across all areas, more than double the amount we directed last year.

Malaria control has long been a central focus of our work—in total, GiveWell has directed more than $1.3 billion to malaria prevention and treatment to date. Malaria kills around 600,000 people each year, most of whom are young children. There are known ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat the disease, but many people in countries where malaria is endemic don’t have access to these resources, and recent declines in health aid have widened existing funding gaps.

Our expanded support could go to current grantees as well as new organizations and novel funding vehicles. We’re in the process of assessing which strategies for deploying new malaria funding are likely to be highly cost-effective and scalable. One strategy we’re exploring is the Malaria Impact Accelerator—a partnership with the Global Fund to help rapidly scale our impact across many programs in many countries at once.

We’re also growing our grantmaking in other areas. We expect to direct more than $1 billion outside malaria in 2027. While the scale of our grantmaking is growing, we remain focused on researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to help people in need as much as we can.

On our blog, we share more about our growing malaria grantmaking—including what and how much we might fund, how long we’ll fund programs, the components of the Malaria Impact Accelerator, and more.

Behind the Research: How Our Team Tackles Hard Questions

As GiveWell works to direct substantially more funding, our research is expanding in two directions: going broader, to cover more areas of global health and development, and going deeper, to improve the inputs that inform our decision-making.

In our recent podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with three researchers about how this expansion is playing out in their work. They each describe a project they’ve taken on: reassessing how to prevent childhood pneumonia deaths, building a better estimate of how many children die of malaria, and developing an AI tool to check our work for errors.

Grant Spotlight

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

What: Implementation and evaluation of an electronic system for tracking health supply stock levels
Where: Five provinces in Laos
Who: Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the mSupply Foundation
Total: Approximately $3.8 million
How it works: Many health systems in low- and middle-income countries track stocks of medicines and supplies with paper registers, which makes it harder to reorder in time and can lead to expired medicines and stockouts. This grant will fund CHAI and the mSupply Foundation to implement an electronic stock-tracking system in local health clinics across five provinces in Laos, and to evaluate its effectiveness through a randomized controlled trial (RCT).
Why this grant: While many countries have begun using electronic stock-tracking systems, there is limited evidence on whether they reduce stockouts or help patients get the treatment they need. We believe this will be the first RCT of these systems in local health clinics, and the first study to attempt to determine whether fewer stockouts lead to more patients receiving treatment. Based on the trial results, we may consider funding the program more widely.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s Unrestricted Fund

To learn more, read the grant page.

Hiring Announcements

We’re continuing to grow our team and have several open positions. If you or someone you know might be a good fit, please apply or share the relevant link below.

• Senior Recruiter, Research
• Senior Communications Officer, Editorial & Production
• Senior Communications Officer, Media & Public Affairs
• Senior Philanthropy Advisor
• Senior Program Officers
• Senior Researchers (subteam-specific roles available)

Visit our Jobs page to see all open positions.

Partner Roundup

• Hear how digital registration changed Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program in Nampula, Mozambique, where we’ve supported the program since 2020.
• Learn how an update to New Incentives’ program lets caregivers recover transportation support they missed on vaccination visits when no field officer was present.
• Read an interview with Helen Keller Intl’s vitamin A program lead about how its program reaches millions of children across Africa each year.

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 October 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

From 2027 through 2032, we’re aiming to grant at least $2.5 billion in new malaria funding, potentially several times that amount. The total amount will depend on the funding we have available, the feasibility of scaling up cost-effective malaria programs, countries’ appetite for those programs, and how opportunities within malaria compare to other grantmaking areas. This expanded support could go to organizations we currently fund (such as the Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium), as well as to new organizations and novel funding vehicles. We are still in the process of assessing which strategies for deploying new malaria funding are likely to be highly cost-effective and scalable, and are currently exploring partnerships with the Global Fund and Gavi to help rapidly scale our impact across many programs in many countries at once.

While this post focuses on our malaria work, we are also growing our grantmaking in other areas. This includes areas we have supported for many years, such as treatment for severe malnutrition, efforts to increase childhood vaccination, and programs to provide safe drinking water, as well as areas we have supported at relatively smaller scale to date, such as medical oxygen, tuberculosis control, and family planning. We currently expect to grant more than $1 billion to program areas outside malaria in 2027, and we think we could grant more with additional funding. While the scale of our grantmaking is growing, we’ll remain focused on researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to help people in need as much as we can.

• Why malaria?
• What and how much might we fund?
• How long will we fund programs?
• The Malaria Impact Accelerator partnership with the Global Fund
  • Why the Global Fund?
• Building the data to scale well
  • Where should funding be targeted, and for which programs?
  • What opportunities are there to improve the quality of implementation?
  • How can we estimate the impact of our funding?
• What we’re working on and what comes next

Why malaria?

Malaria kills around 600,000 people each year, most of whom are young children.[1] We know how to prevent, diagnose, and treat malaria. Effective prevention can be provided via vector control (especially long-lasting insecticide-treated nets), chemoprevention, and vaccination.[2] Inexpensive rapid diagnostic tests can be used to identify when people have been infected with malaria,[3] and artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) or injectable artesunate are highly effective treatments.[4] However, many people in countries where malaria is endemic do not have access to prevention and treatment.[5]

Governments of malaria-endemic countries fund a substantial part of their own malaria responses,[6] but in many high-burden countries, domestic budgets alone cannot cover what is needed. In addition, recent declines in health aid have widened gaps that already existed. Donors pledged $12.6 billion for the Global Fund’s latest replenishment, down from $15.7 billion three years earlier and well short of the $18 billion target.[7] As a result, the Global Fund has allocated $3.5 billion to countries for its next three years of malaria grants, about 15% less than in the previous three-year cycle.[8] Gavi, which funds malaria vaccines, raised just under $10 billion of its $11.9 billion budget for 2026–2030 and reduced the malaria vaccine coverage it will fund as a result.[9] At the same time, newer tools that could drive significant advances, such as dual-ingredient nets designed to counter insecticide resistance, cost more than older ones.[10]

Malaria control has long been a central focus of our work. In total, GiveWell has directed more than $1.3 billion to malaria prevention and treatment, including more than $750 million for nets and more than $500 million for seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which we estimate will save more than 300,000 lives.

Malaria stands out among the areas we’re exploring for expanded grantmaking because such large funding gaps exist for programs that have strong evidence of effectiveness and that GiveWell has experience funding. This contrasts with other grantmaking areas we’re exploring, where we’re earlier in our understanding. We expect to make more grants and larger grants in some of these other areas as we learn more about them.

What and how much might we fund?

To identify programs[11] we might fund through our expanded malaria portfolio, we looked for those that have evidence of reducing illness and death, are feasible to deliver where malaria is most common, and could fit with national priorities. We’ve also focused our analysis to date on programs where we expect the largest funding gaps to exist, since those areas could make the biggest difference to how much funding we allocate.

Based on this initial work, we see room for at least $2.5 billion in grantmaking to malaria programs from 2027 through 2032 at our current cost-effectiveness bar (you can read more about the role of cost-effectiveness in our funding decisions). With more funding, we could grant substantially more, potentially at a lower cost-effectiveness bar.

Our early expectation is that most of this funding could go to support the programs below. The list focuses on programs that could be both cost-effective and have large funding gaps.[12]

Note, however, that this list is neither comprehensive nor final. We expect to update the list of potential programs over time and to update our view of the programs listed as we do more research and learn from national malaria programs and other implementers.

• Prevention programs, such as insecticide-treated nets, seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and malaria vaccines, including running these programs more often or reaching people these programs do not currently cover.
• Testing and treatment programs and commodities, such as case management by community health workers, and support for supply chains that transport diagnostic tests and treatment drugs to clinics.
• Newer tools, such as spatial emanators and insecticide-treated babywraps, provided they are supported by sufficient high-quality evidence. We expect to fund some of that evidence generation ourselves, including additional randomized trials.

The technical notes for each program summarize our current understanding and uncertainties. Overall, we’re more confident in our understanding of net campaigns and SMC for young children, which we’ve funded at a large scale for years now. We’re still developing our understanding of the cost-effectiveness of approaches like supporting community health workers and support for supply chains, chemoprevention for older children, and efforts to increase coverage of the malaria vaccine and newer tools at scale.

The most cost-effective mix of programs will also vary from place to place. For example, a given program may be highly cost-effective where malaria is common, the program is feasible to implement, and few people have alternative sources of malaria prevention, and much less so where the reverse is true.

Alongside multiyear grants for these programs, we expect to fund supporting work such as monitoring and evaluation, evidence generation, operational research, market shaping, technical assistance, advocacy, and possibly research and development.

GiveWell uses a cost-effectiveness threshold that helps us decide whether to provide funding to a program. We currently fund programs that are at least 6 times more cost-effective than our benchmark. We have rough projections of how much malaria funding we could grant at different levels of cost-effectiveness, but these are early estimates that we expect to change substantially as we do more research and learn from national programs and implementers about which programs they want to prioritize and can deliver well. In the future, the threshold we use to make funding decisions may change depending on how much funding we raise and what outcomes we believe can be achieved.

How long will we fund programs?

We’re working to secure the resources needed to support these programs for five to six years. We think this will let us fund more cost-effective programs more quickly. Expanding a malaria program takes upfront work, like planning, hiring and training staff, and setting up operations in new locations. In our experience, national programs and other implementers are more willing to take that on if they expect funding to last long enough for the work to pay off. With only a short funding period, many would reasonably expand less, leading to less impact.

A longer time frame also means we can act on the evidence we help build. We expect to fund studies of some newer tools. If evidence shows a tool works and can be delivered well, we want to have funding ready to deliver it at scale, ensuring the evidence translates quickly into impact.

Our intention is to renew the initial grants, which will likely cover about two to three years of programming, and we plan to set aside the funding to continue programming when we make initial commitments. Before renewing, we will consider whether governments are interested in continuing the programs and whether they’re having the expected outcomes (e.g., whether coverage surveys show they’re reaching the people they’re meant to, and whether malaria prevalence is falling in the areas they cover). Many of the programs we’re considering are ambitious and new at this scale, such as running net campaigns more often or extending chemoprevention to older children, and we, alongside national programs and other implementers, expect to learn a lot in the first few years about what works. We’ll also consider whether other funding for malaria programs has gone down, because we intend for our funding to add to what governments and other donors already spend, not replace it.

If we decide to reduce or end funding after an initial grant, we plan to give national governments and other implementers as much notice as we can and to step funding down gradually. As we do with our existing grantees, we expect to provide exit funding to allow for a well-managed wind-down. Where we can, we’ll also design programs so that governments or other funders can more easily continue them.

The Malaria Impact Accelerator partnership with the Global Fund

The Malaria Impact Accelerator is a proposed partnership between GiveWell and the Global Fund, and one of several ways we are considering directing our expanded malaria funding. It would build on the Global Fund’s processes, with a few key differences.[13] First, the funding through this partnership would be specific to malaria[14] and allocations to countries through this partnership would be more proportionate to malaria burden than the Global Fund’s core allocations. As a result, in comparison to the Global Fund’s typical processes, we expect funds allocated through the Malaria Impact Accelerator will go to a smaller number of higher burden countries. Additionally, the funding would only support programs we assess to be above our cost-effectiveness bar. We would also fund independent monitoring of these programs and publish the results.

The proposed Malaria Impact Accelerator has three main components: (1) country “investment requests,” which are plans countries would submit for how they would use additional funds, (2) a “fast track” for urgent needs, and (3) funding for complementary work.

We expect most funding in the Malaria Impact Accelerator to support country “investment requests,” giving countries additional funds to support their national malaria priorities. GiveWell and the Global Fund would jointly set a maximum funding allocation for each eligible country and provide guidance on which programs are eligible and how cost-effectiveness will shape funding decisions. We would also fund technical support for countries that want it in preparing their requests. Each country, operating through existing Country Coordinating Mechanisms,[15] would choose the programs it wants to include in its investment requests based on its own priorities, including those in its National Strategic Plans. Requests would be reviewed by the Global Fund’s existing Technical Review Panel for technical soundness and by GiveWell for cost-effectiveness, and countries would have an opportunity to revise requests in response to feedback before GiveWell and the Global Fund’s final joint funding decisions.[16]

Because these requests take time to prepare and review, we also expect to run a “fast track” to fund urgent gaps countries have already identified as priorities in highly cost-effective programs.

Finally, we expect to set aside some funding for complementary work that doesn’t fit within a single country’s request. This funding could support bringing new tools to market, making tools more affordable, or generating evidence on questions that help us make better funding decisions.

Why the Global Fund

We think partnering with the Global Fund is the fastest way to scale up malaria funding, reduce malaria burden, and support national malaria responses. The Global Fund is the largest international funder of malaria programs, disbursing roughly $1 billion to $1.5 billion a year for malaria over the past decade.[17] It has long-standing relationships and established funding processes in the countries where malaria burden and funding gaps are highest. Working within those processes means countries won’t need an entirely separate process to work with us. In addition, the Global Fund has financial controls and an independent audit office to help prevent fraud and waste.

We’ll decide how much to grant through the Malaria Impact Accelerator as we do more research on the funding opportunities, see applications from countries, and get more information from the Global Fund. However, there are a few considerations that could lead us to grant less than expected through this mechanism, or none at all:

• The Global Fund’s commitment and capacity. The Global Fund’s board has yet to approve the mechanism. It will soon select a new executive director and seat its recently elected board leadership. The partnership depends on sustained commitment from Global Fund leadership and on the Global Fund executing well. We expect to contribute funding to the Secretariat’s operations, including dedicated staff capacity to support this, and we’ll be watching for continued engagement through the duration of the partnership.
• Track record of Global Fund-funded programming. We want to understand how many people Global Fund-supported programs reach and where coverage could be improved. To do this, we’re funding independent coverage surveys and qualitative research after recent campaigns, and triangulating with coverage surveys from other sources where possible. If coverage appears lower than we expect and difficult to improve, we may grant less funding through the mechanism.
• What we learn from countries. Once we tell a country its maximum funding amount, that funding will be available for requests that meet our cost-effectiveness bar. As countries plan and submit investment requests, we may find that interest in some programs we think are highly cost-effective is lower than we expected, or that they are harder to deliver at scale than we expect. This could lead GiveWell to grant less funding overall or similar amounts at a slower pace.
• Longer-term risks. Increased philanthropic funding could lead governments and other donors to cut their own malaria spending, or could strain health systems. We plan to engage with governments and donors to emphasize that our funding is intended to be additional to theirs, and that its impact depends on their continued vital investments. We’re exploring matched funding and advocacy to encourage them to sustain their spending. We also expect to fund health systems investments that support malaria programs, and to monitor whether other care is affected. If we think there is likely to be substantial risk of crowding out or negative spillovers to the broader health system that we are unable to mitigate, it could cause us to grant less funding.

In the event we direct less funding than expected or no funding through this partnership with the Global Fund, we would plan to scale up malaria funding through other grantees, including organizations we fund today.

Building the data to scale well

We plan to fund additional data collection, monitoring, and strengthening of existing data systems so that national malaria programs, other implementers, and funders, including GiveWell, have better information for their decisions. We think these efforts could help answer key questions for both malaria and non-malaria programs:

1. Where should funding be targeted and for which programs?
2. What opportunities are there to improve the quality of implementation?
3. How can GiveWell estimate the impact of our funding?

Where should funding be targeted, and for which programs?

Decisions about where to direct resources for malaria programming mostly rely on routine health facility data, which can be inaccurate in areas with a high malaria burden,[18] and on national household surveys that run every few years at best.[19]

With national malaria programs’ agreement and collaboration, we plan to fund nationally representative household surveys in countries where we may grant substantial additional funding, to be completed prior to our key funding decisions, and to strengthen the routine data that national programs collect from health facilities and hospitals. Together, these should give better estimates of malaria prevalence, severe malaria, child mortality, and program coverage. Some of the same data will also be useful for other programs. For example, the household surveys will ask whether children received vitamin A supplements in the past six months. This could give health ministries additional information on where supplementation is hitting coverage targets and where more support might be needed. We also expect to fund monitoring of drug and insecticide resistance and of mosquito populations. Current monitoring has significant geographic gaps, and resistance can make programs less effective over time.[20]

Better data would help in tailoring programs to local conditions, identifying emerging risks to program efficacy, and directing newer tools to the areas that need them.

What opportunities are there to improve the quality of implementation?

Many health programs report the number of people reached from implementers’ own records, which raises concerns about data completeness, data quality, and the potential for bias. We expect to fund independent household coverage surveys, which estimate what share of the eligible population was reached, and visits to a sample of people recorded as receiving services to check that they did.

We think that funding to strengthen existing data collection systems can help implementers identify and fix implementation issues while programs are running. For example, an unexpected increase in malaria among pregnant women at their first antenatal visit could signal that prevention efforts in that area aren’t reaching people or working as intended. Signs of growing drug or insecticide resistance could prompt a switch to a different drug or type of net. Finally, we will explore support to other modes of learning about program implementation such as community-led monitoring.

How can we estimate the impact of our funding?

Most estimates of the impact of large health programs, including GiveWell’s, are modeled or extrapolated using data from administrative systems, infrequent surveys, and/or older trials run in different settings and at smaller scale. We’re considering two approaches that may allow us to more directly measure the impact of increased malaria funding on prevalence and mortality.

• We could compare changes in prevalence and mortality between areas that receive more of our funding and areas that receive less, and treat the difference as the effect of our funding. This gives a causal estimate if the two sets of areas would have changed in the same way without our funding. To make it more likely this assumption holds, we would likely restrict the comparison to the most similar areas.
• We could use the way individual programs are rolled out to compare similar groups that do and do not receive the program. For example, chemoprevention programs typically target only certain ages, so we could compare children just above and below that limit to estimate program impact. These comparisons are more credibly causal, but each one covers only a small part of what we fund and misses how programs work in combination.

We will adapt our approach to data collection over time as we further define our scaling plans and learn more from governments and other implementers. Some specific uncertainties include:

• Specific support for national malaria control programs and implementers. We’re eager to learn from national malaria programs and implementers about how best to ensure that these efforts can be used to help with planning and program improvements. We know that one strategy is to share results using systems and formats they already use. Over the next few months, we expect to share results from data collection we’re already funding and will work to learn more about the best ways to support governments and implementers in using these data and to strengthen existing data systems.
• Timing. It’s possible that some of the surveys we plan to fund may not generate findings prior to the funding decisions we intend them to inform. While this would reduce their usefulness for that purpose, the data could potentially be used to inform governments and other implementers. In addition, if we think surveys could not be completed in time to inform particular decisions, we may choose to spend less on them.
• Attribution of impact. We may not be able to attribute changes in malaria or mortality to our funding. Doing so depends on comparable regions receiving funding at different times or intensities, which we may not control. We are also likely to be underpowered to detect effects on mortality for several years.
• Sustainability of these data systems. Countries may not want or be able to keep paying for these data if our funding ends. We’re exploring ways to test cheaper methods that would be easier to sustain without external support (such as phone surveys, data gathered during routine health facility visits, and prediction models) against more expensive data collection techniques, such as in-person household surveys.

What we’re working on and what comes next

As with the rest of our grantmaking, we expect our malaria plans to evolve as we learn from new research, from conversations with governments and other partners, and from new data collected from the programs we fund. To drive this work forward, in the coming months we expect to:

• Update our understanding of the cost-effectiveness of programs and real-world funding gaps. By reviewing published research and having conversations with experts at all levels, national malaria programs, and our partners, we’re working to deepen our understanding of the impact and cost-effectiveness of specific programs we could fund. We are also working to better understand which programs are already funded and where gaps remain in the countries where we expect to fund the most.
• Fund immediate gaps that we know about. Some countries have already planned highly cost-effective programs, such as net campaigns, that they can’t pay for. We expect to support these programs in whichever way makes the most sense. This may mean approving grants to the Against Malaria Foundation or Malaria Consortium, two of our current grantees; funding the programs through the Malaria Impact Accelerator’s fast track; or potentially funding other implementing organizations.
• Fund baseline data collection. With national programs’ approval, we expect to fund household surveys in countries where we may end up directing the most funding. These would measure malaria prevalence, child mortality, and program coverage before funding scales up. We’re also finishing the review of coverage surveys of recent Global Fund-supported campaigns described above.
• Take the next steps on new partnerships. If the Global Fund’s board approves the Malaria Impact Accelerator mechanism and we decide to move forward with the partnership, we expect to work with Global Fund staff to set country allocations, publish the guidance described above, and begin funding technical support for countries that want it. At the same time, we’re exploring partnerships with other organizations, including funding malaria vaccines through Gavi, which could help us reach more people with cost-effective malaria programs.

We’ll keep updating our plans as this work progresses, and we plan to share what we learn along the way.

The post Further Scaling Our Malaria Grantmaking appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how this expansion is playing out on GiveWell’s research team, as three researchers each describe a project they have taken on: reassessing how to prevent childhood pneumonia deaths, building a better estimate of how many children die of malaria, and developing an AI tool to check our work for errors.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera, Senior Researcher James Watson, and Research Analyst Meghna Ray about the projects they’ve worked on and what it’s like to do research at GiveWell.

Elie, Dilhan, James, and Meghna discuss:

• Changing direction as we follow the evidence: Pneumonia causes around 10% to 15% of deaths among children under five globally. Our New Areas research subteam, which investigates cause areas that are newer to GiveWell, first examined community-based treatment options for reducing these deaths by treating children with amoxicillin, an inexpensive antibiotic. That approach initially looked promising, but conversations with researchers and implementers indicated that many pneumonia deaths today are caused by infections that amoxicillin doesn’t treat. We then shifted our attention toward another strategy for reducing pneumonia deaths: providing medical oxygen for severely ill children in hospitals. This costs more per patient but targets the children at greatest risk of dying and can also treat diseases beyond pneumonia. If expanding access to medical oxygen proves cost-effective, it could become a new way for GiveWell to help prevent these deaths.
• Improving our estimates for key cost-effectiveness inputs: Assessing the cost-effectiveness of malaria programs generally requires estimating the number of children who die from malaria in a given place, but that figure is surprisingly uncertain. In many places where we fund programs, cause-of-death data come mainly from interviews with families rather than from health system records. Because malaria symptoms are very similar to symptoms for many other diseases, knowing the symptoms a child was experiencing is often insufficient to determine whether malaria was the cause of death. To more accurately determine the share of deaths caused by malaria, we are developing an approach based on the share of school-aged children infected with malaria (which can be measured accurately using rapid fingerprick tests) and the overall child death rate (measured reliably using large household surveys). We then use the relationship between infection levels and deaths to estimate how many are attributable to malaria. Because this approach is based on data that we think can more reliably assess malaria-specific deaths, we expect it will be better at identifying differences in malaria deaths between regions, which could allow us to target malaria funding to the places where it will do the most good.
• Developing new tools to increase research capacity: Our cost-effectiveness spreadsheets are often very complex, and errors in their formulas or inputs can meaningfully change our estimate of a program’s cost-effectiveness, which is a key factor in our funding decisions. Research analysts have long vetted these analyses line by line to ensure their accuracy. We recently built an AI tool to assist in that process. Early versions reliably caught errors in formulas but often missed issues a human reviewer would catch, such as outdated data or inconsistent assumptions. To address this, we compiled errors analysts had found in past reviews and refined the tool until it caught more than 90% of them. The tool now serves as a first pass, followed by a research analyst reviewing its findings. As a result, vetting that took as long as a week now takes a few hours. Speeding up this check while maintaining accuracy frees researchers to spend more time on the substantive questions behind our grants.

This conversation explores aspects of our research process: building models, engaging with academic experts and implementing organizations, prioritizing the questions most likely to change our minds, and checking our work. This is part of what our researchers do, and we’re actively hiring for research roles so that we can keep identifying highly cost-effective programs and directing donors’ funds to the programs we think will 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 September 16, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Behind the Research: How Our Team Tackles Hard Questions appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Our Growing Impact

Last year, GiveWell raised $616 million and directed $427 million to programs in 32 countries. That was our largest fundraising year to date, and we’re now preparing for the potential of a future at a substantially larger scale. We’ve already directed over $600 million in 2026 to help people in need, and thanks to the generous support from our donors, we think our grantmaking may approach or even exceed $1 billion this year.

We recently published our 2025 metrics report, which covers both our fundraising and the impact we had with the donations we received. In total, we expect the programs we funded will save about 86,000 lives.

Despite the growth of our grantmaking, the needs and opportunities before us continue to far exceed available resources. More than four million young children die in low- and middle-income countries every year, and most of those deaths are preventable.¹Our World in Data, “Number of child deaths,” 2024, shows 1.60 million deaths of children under five in low-income countries and 2.73 million in lower-middle-income countries, totaling 4.33 million in 2024. World Bank Group, “Mortality rate, under-5 (per 1,000 live births)” shows a mortality rate for children under five of 40.8 for low- and middle-income countries and a child mortality rate of 5.1 for high-income countries in 2024. If children under five in low- and middle-income countries were to die at the child mortality rate of high-income countries rather than at their current rate, representing the potential effect of high-income country conditions existing across low- and middle-income countries, 87.5% of child deaths in low- and middle-income countries would be averted: 5.1 / 40.8 = 12.5%, or 1 − 0.125 = 87.5% percent averted. We are growing our team to investigate and fund promising programs at a scale we haven’t previously been able to pursue—and we continue to invite donors to help us.

Over the past two years, we’ve increased our research team from 38 people to 85, and we’re continuing to hire across the organization. That increased capacity lets us explore more areas and move more funding to programs we believe could do extraordinary good. We’re going deeper in areas we know well, such as malaria—where we expect to direct nearly three times as much funding this year as we did last year. We’re also pursuing new approaches, including partnerships that could reach many more people quickly and grants that generate the evidence we need to guide future funding decisions.

You can learn more about GiveWell’s expansion efforts, what’s driving our growth, how we’re scaling our impact, and recent examples of our progress in the new “Growth and Expansion” section of our website, which we’ll be updating as this work progresses.

GiveWell’s CEO Speaks at Devex Impact House

During UN General Assembly week, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld joined Devex Impact House for a conversation about how to direct more funding toward opportunities to save and improve lives.

Photo credit: Joel S Photo LLC for Devex

Elie discussed how GiveWell decides which programs to fund, how we’re preparing for a potential increase in philanthropic giving, and why truth-seeking and transparency remain central to our approach. He also described how our grantmaking has expanded to include programs whose impact is harder to measure and how we’re building learning and evaluation into more of our grants.

Watch the event recording or read Devex’s coverage of the conversation.

Pressure-Testing Our Research as GiveWell Grows

GiveWell’s Cross-Cutting research subteam focuses on improving our grantmaking over time—it investigates the impact of the programs we fund, works to resolve our largest uncertainties, and strengthens our data collection and analysis.

In our recent podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Alex Cohen, who leads the Cross-Cutting subteam, about how better data can improve our decision-making, how we’re working to gather stronger evidence, and how we’ve tested AI as a tool to increase our research capacity and quality.

Grant Spotlight

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

Where: Up to 54 low- and middle-income countries
What: Procurement of contraceptives and other reproductive health commodities
Who: UNFPA Supplies Partnership
Total: $10 million
How it works: The United Nations estimates that 165 million women aged 15 to 49 worldwide have an unmet need for family planning, meaning they want to avoid or delay pregnancy but are not using contraception. The UNFPA Supplies Partnership pools funding from multiple donors to buy contraceptives and other reproductive health supplies in bulk, then allocates them across its 54 focus countries. This grant will primarily be used to fund those purchases over two years.
Why this grant: Gaps in the global supply of family planning products are large and growing, and we expect this funding to make more contraceptives available to people who want them. This is also our first grant through a pooled fund, and we expect to learn whether this model could be an effective way to direct funding at a larger scale.
Funded by: Coefficient Giving

To learn more, read the grant page.

Hiring Announcements

Featured Roles: Senior Communications Officers
We’re hiring three Senior Communications Officers to build and lead our communications function. These roles will be the first of their kind at GiveWell, and we are looking for exceptional leaders who can help set the standard for how we operate.

• Senior Communications Officer, Strategic Communications: Lead GiveWell’s development of messaging and narratives that explain its work across different audiences and contexts.
• Senior Communications Officer, Media & Public Affairs: Lead how GiveWell’s work is represented in the media and in public conversations.
• Senior Communications Officer, Editorial & Production: Lead the editorial quality and production of GiveWell’s communications.

If you’re an experienced communications professional with expertise in one of these areas and are excited to help build the communications capacity GiveWell needs for its next stage of growth, we’d love to hear from you.

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

• Head of Legal
• Senior Recruiter, Research
• Cause Prioritization Lead (apply by Oct 30)
• Senior Program Officers
• Senior Researchers (subteam-specific roles available)

Visit our Jobs page to see all open positions.

Partner Roundup

• Celebrate the Against Malaria Foundation passing $1 billion raised, a milestone made possible by more than 1.6 million donations from 253,000 people, with our recent $276 million grant taking it past the mark.
• See how Helen Keller Intl built vitamin A supplementation into routine clinic visits in rural Nigeria to better reach children missed by periodic campaigns.
• Watch New Incentives’ Operations Director discuss what it takes to strengthen routine immunization in northern Nigeria.

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 September 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Alex Cohen, who leads the Cross-Cutting subteam, about how better data can improve our decision-making, our work to gather stronger evidence, and the ways we’ve tested AI as a tool to increase our research capacity and quality.

Elie and Alex discuss:

• Triangulating multiple data sources to check impact: Directing donations to programs we believe will do the most good requires understanding the impact of the programs we support. Organizations provide us with monitoring data, but we know there are many ways that, despite the best intentions, this data can be biased or incomplete. To address this, we are investing in additional sources and types of data to improve the accuracy of our estimates. For example, in Burkina Faso we’re funding dried-blood tests to better understand whether caregivers are completing the second and third at-home doses of seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which provides preventive malaria medication. We think this will improve our understanding of how accurate self-reported data is and whether funding to boost coverage of second and third doses of the medication could cost-effectively help people.
• Setting quality standards for survey data: GiveWell often collects survey data at the end of a program to better understand its impact and answer our open questions, but survey data is prone to error. For example, GiveWell researchers shadowed surveyors in Uganda and Nigeria who worked long days under time pressure, creating conditions where hard-to-access households were more likely to be skipped. Because those households may also be the ones programs are most likely to miss, this could lead to overestimating coverage. We’re working to reduce these errors by investing in more independent data checks, and we’ve developed survey guidelines that include practices like GPS tracking and verifying whether a random sample of households was surveyed.
• Using AI to critique our work: GiveWell is experimenting with AI tools to increase our research capacity and improve its quality. Our cost-effectiveness models are an important part of our funding decisions, and we carefully vet them to reduce the chance of mistakes. We’ve developed and trained an AI model that, with human oversight, can catch errors that previously required tedious staff review, opening up some capacity for those reviewers to support the team in other ways. We’re also experimenting with using AI to critique and identify weaknesses in our research, though we’ve had more limited success with this strategy.

By investing in more and better data and experimenting with new tools, we’re working to expand our research capacity while strengthening the rigor of our work as our grantmaking scales.

Growing our research team is central to these goals, and GiveWell is actively hiring researchers and program officers. New members of our research team typically start on the Cross-Cutting subteam as part of their onboarding and training. If someone you know might be a good fit, please share our open roles!

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 August 21, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Pressure-Testing Our Research as GiveWell Grows appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

We have spent years growing our research capacity and scope to enable us to direct significantly more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find, and 2025 was a milestone in that ongoing growth. We responded to urgent needs generated by foreign aid cuts, and we continued to find and fund a growing number and a wider range of high-impact ways to help people. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion in 2026, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale.

And yet, global needs still far exceed available resources. More than four million young children die in low- and middle-income countries every year—and most of those deaths are preventable.⁴Our World in Data, “Number of child deaths,” 2024, shows 1.60 million deaths of children under five in low-income countries and 2.73 million in lower-middle-income countries, totaling 4.33 million in 2024. World Bank Group, “Mortality rate, under-5 (per 1,000 live births)” shows a mortality rate for children under five of 40.8 for low- and middle-income countries and a child mortality rate of 5.1 for high-income countries in 2024. If children under five in low- and middle-income countries were to die at the child mortality rate of high-income countries rather than at their current rate, representing the potential effect of high-income country conditions existing across low- and middle-income countries, 87.5% of child deaths in low- and middle-income countries would be averted: 5.1 / 40.8 = 12.5%, or 1 − 0.125 = 87.5% percent averted. As our team works toward our goal of helping people at a much larger scale, we’re grateful to the donors whose support enables us to continue to find and fund highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most.

See our full 2025 metrics report for more details behind the money we raised, the funds we directed, operational expenses, donor metrics, and the impact we had last year.

Funds Raised

We raised more money in 2025 than we have during any previous year, and that was also true for donations to each of our giving funds:

• All Grants Fund: donations of $154 million in 2025, compared to $59 million in 2024
• Top Charities Fund: donations of $126 million in 2025, compared to $64 million in 2024
• Unrestricted Fund: donations of $199 million in 2025, compared to $111 million in 2024

Most donors who give via GiveWell rely on GiveWell to allocate their donation rather than choosing to restrict their donation to a particular organization. Around 95% of funds raised during 2025 fell into this category, which is higher than any previous year.⁵These funds include donations to the All Grants Fund, donations to the Top Charities Fund, donations to our Unrestricted Fund (which can be allocated to any GiveWell priority, including grantmaking and our own operating expenses), and grants we recommend that other funders make. This category excludes donations to individual Top Charities (either through us or directly to the organization) unless the donation is the result of a specific request we made to a donor.

Funds Directed

In 2025, we directed around $427 million to high-impact programs and organizations. This represents an increase of 8% in funds directed compared to 2024. GiveWell made grants across several areas within global health and development, including grants to incubate newer programs, provide direct delivery of health commodities, promote policy change, fund relevant scoping and research, or support other potentially high-impact, cost-effective initiatives.

Around $124 million (29% of funds directed) went to our four Top Charities: the Against Malaria Foundation’s insecticide-treated nets via the Against Malaria Foundation, vitamin A supplementation via Helen Keller Intl, seasonal malaria chemoprevention via Malaria Consortium, and conditional cash transfers to increase infant vaccination via New Incentives.

We expanded our research scope in 2025 to help us identify more high-impact opportunities. For example, we:

• Invested in the growth of our new areas research team, which investigates programs and cause areas that GiveWell hasn’t historically focused on.
• Deepened our investigation of livelihoods programs, which increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty, by hiring a dedicated program officer.
• Funded initial grants in a newly established family planning portfolio.

Our growing research capacity meant that we could find a broader array of highly impactful programs. Around $303 million (71% of funds directed) went to programs beyond our Top Charities, including malnutrition treatment, iron fortification and supplementation, syphilis screening and treatment, water quality interventions, and much more. We believe this effort to uncover new, cost-effective ways to save and improve lives will enable us to do even more good in future years.

The post GiveWell’s 2025 Metrics and Impact appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Announcing Our Largest Grant to Date

GiveWell recently made our largest grant to date: $276 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) for insecticide-treated net campaigns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It will support the purchase and distribution of around 92 million nets for campaigns across all 26 provinces from 2027 through 2029, 46 million of which we think would not have been distributed otherwise. We estimate the grant will avert approximately 67,000 deaths.

A grant of this size called for research we couldn’t have taken on a few years ago. Our new blog post with interactive data visualizations walks through some of that research and allows you to explore our analysis. We’ve spent years building a team that can do this kind of work, and it’s showing up in how much funding we can move—we anticipate our grantmaking will approach or potentially exceed $1 billion this year.

In this grant investigation, our increased capacity enabled our research team to dig deeper than we’ve been able to in the past and build the confidence needed to make this grant. In the blog, you can read about how they tested whether past campaigns we funded had actually reduced child deaths, drew on several sources of data to sharpen our estimate of DRC’s malaria burden, and examined how quickly nets wear out there.

In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Alex Bowles, who led the investigation. They discuss the questions the team set out to answer during the grant investigation, and what changes when GiveWell funds a program at this scale.

Share Your Feedback on Our Newsletter

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Question 1: Thinking about the last few newsletters, how much do you usually read?

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Finding the Bottlenecks in Family Planning Access

In our recent podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera about the roughly $20 million in family planning programming we’ve funded over the past year, how we’ve structured our grant portfolio, and what we’re hoping to learn.

Elie and Dilhan discuss:

• Funding across the family planning system: Providing people with family planning resources requires a three-tiered system—purchasing contraceptives, moving them through the supply chain to health facilities, and delivering services to clients. We’ve made grants at all three levels to learn where additional funding could do the most good.
• Reaching people with limited access: We made two grants aiming to increase access at the local level, each taking a different approach so we can learn more about which strategies are most cost-effective: MSI Reproductive Choices sends small teams of nurses to communities that lack family planning services, and Lafiya trains local health workers to provide family planning services in the communities where they live.
• Building evidence alongside the grants: There are relatively few randomized trials of family planning programs and limited rigorous evidence on the specific programs we’re funding, so we’ve built learning opportunities into all of our family planning grants to help inform our future grantmaking.

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: Six regions in Mali—Bamako, Gao, Kidal, Ménaka, Taoudénit, and Tombouctou
What: Vitamin A supplementation (VAS) to reduce young children’s risk of death from common illnesses
Who: Helen Keller Intl
Total: Approximately $882,000
How it works: Vitamin A deficiency weakens children’s immune systems and increases the risk of death from illnesses like diarrhea and measles. Helen Keller Intl’s VAS program provides financial and technical support to government-run VAS programs that deliver supplements twice per year to children between 6 and 59 months old. This grant funds two rounds of VAS campaigns across six regions of Mali in 2026.
Why this grant: Without this grant, these regions would likely not receive VAS this year. Helen Keller Intl already supports VAS campaigns elsewhere in Mali and has experience working in these areas, so we believe it is well positioned to expand its VAS program to cover this gap.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund

Hiring Announcements

Featured Role: Head of Legal
We’re hiring a Head of Legal to lead GiveWell’s legal function and build a team that can scale with our expected growth.

This role will own GiveWell’s legal portfolio and strategy, manage risk and compliance across multiple jurisdictions, and oversee our grants administration function. This is a founding leadership role that will design the systems, processes, and team structure we need as the organization grows.

If you’re an experienced attorney who is excited to build a legal function from the ground up, we’d love to hear from you.

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

• (New!) Cause Prioritization Lead (apply by Sept 30)
• Operations Roles (apply by Sept 7)
• Senior Program Officers
• Program Officers
• Senior Researchers (subteam-specific roles available)
• Senior Accountant
• Staff Accountant

Visit our Jobs page to see all open positions.

Partner Roundup

• Follow a New Incentives data collector through a day of household surveys measuring vaccination coverage in northern Nigeria.
• See AMF’s announcement of our $276 million milestone grant to prevent malaria in DRC.
• Read Malaria Consortium’s update on Burkina Faso, where total malaria deaths fell 44% in a year, thanks in part to seasonal malaria chemoprevention.

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 August 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

As part of our ongoing efforts to scale our research and funding to direct much more money where it can do extraordinary good, GiveWell recently made its largest grant ever: $276 million to fund the purchase and distribution of malaria nets in DRC through the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF).[2] This grant, which we announced earlier this week via our podcast, is being funded by Coefficient Giving and donations to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund.[3]

We estimate this grant will lead to the distribution of around 92 million insecticide-treated nets (ITNs), 46 million of which we think would not otherwise be distributed, and will avert approximately 67,000 deaths.

The research we conducted as part of this grant investigation led us to two key decisions:

• First, this grant is much larger than our past funding for nets in DRC, enabling the purchase of nets for use across all 26 provinces of DRC from 2027 through 2029 and covering $60 million in distribution costs.[4]
• Second, the funding will shorten the time between regular net distributions to provide additional protection against malaria in up to five provinces with higher malaria burden.

Looking back to move forward

Making such a large grant required an intensive grant investigation process, beginning with an analysis of one of our past grants to AMF for insecticide-treated nets in DRC. In that analysis, we drew on multiple independent data sources, funded qualitative interviews to gather more information, and conducted a novel empirical analysis to deepen our confidence. Those findings fed into our investigation for this grant, where we were able to do more and deeper research than we had in past investigations, increasing our confidence, especially in three areas:

• How effective are insecticide-treated nets at reducing cases of malaria?
• How many children are contracting and dying from malaria in specific areas of DRC?
• How long do the nets provide protection against malaria infections?

These three questions were central to our decision making for this grant, as each informs a key parameter in our cost-effectiveness analysis. GiveWell focuses on identifying the programs that save or improve lives the most per dollar, so that the limited amount of funding available can make the greatest difference. We do that by creating cost-effectiveness analyses of the programs we evaluate.

We used a recent Demographic and Health Survey in DRC as a key data source for our research. These surveys provide important health and mortality data in many low- and middle-income countries by conducting very large in-person, house-to-house surveys that ask women to recall their children’s birth and survival histories. One of these surveys was conducted in DRC in 2023-2024, providing us with a rich resource to inform our grantmaking decision.

We analyzed the survey data, along with a number of other data sources—including hundreds of thousands of household surveys conducted during AMF’s post-distribution monitoring of campaigns that we previously funded.[5] Together, these sources helped increase our confidence in our DRC-specific estimates of the effectiveness of insecticide-treated nets, the duration of net protection, and the overall malaria burden.

That, in turn, led us to make a much larger grant than we had in the past and increase the frequency of net distribution campaigns in areas with particularly high malaria mortality.

Why we made our largest grant ever

Evidence shows that malaria nets, which are typically hung over beds or other sleeping spaces, are effective at protecting people from mosquitoes at night—and significantly reduce the risk of becoming infected with malaria. GiveWell has funded AMF-supported net campaigns in DRC since 2019. Those earlier grants supported nets campaigns in specific areas of DRC, and most of the funding was focused on procuring nets.[6]

This grant does much more. It supports net procurement across all 26 of DRC’s provinces and includes $60 million to cover a portion of the costs to distribute those nets. The process for ordering and procuring nets can take a number of months, and we understand that previous net campaigns in DRC were delayed because the government did not have all the funding to plan a full net cycle up front. By making a large grant that allows planning, ordering, and procuring with a sufficient lead time, we expect to increase the likelihood that the net campaigns occur on schedule.

Three findings from our investigation drove that decision: we confirmed that nets significantly reduce child deaths in DRC, we deepened our confidence that DRC’s malaria burden is exceptionally high, and we found that existing funding couldn’t cover all the areas where campaigns would have a high impact.

Nets significantly reduce child deaths in DRC

We are confident that nets are effective at reducing malaria infections. We estimate that children’s risk of dying from malaria is reduced by 24% to 56% (depending on location) per year of effective protection from a net. This estimate is based on our analysis of Pryce et al. 2018, a systematic review of studies of insecticide-treated nets across a number of countries. While we are confident that nets save lives, we also know that context makes a difference—programs that work in one place often do not have precisely the same effect in another location. As a result, for this grant investigation, we worked to learn more about the effectiveness of nets in DRC specifically.

Net distribution campaigns in DRC take place province by province at different times. As a result, we were able to use the timing of the campaigns relative to the timing of children’s births to measure the length of time that children had protection from nets. We linked each household from a recent Demographic and Health Survey to the most recent insecticide-treated net campaign in its province, calculating the number of months since the campaign mid-point. We then compared mortality in households that were relatively near each other but across province borders, such that households on one side had recently received nets and households on the other side had not.

In the map below you can see the length of time since the most recent nets campaign in each province—one key input into our analysis.

Our analysis found that net campaigns significantly reduced malaria infections and also reduced the overall risk of child death.[7] That finding, along with additional information we gathered about DRC’s malaria burden (described in the section below), provided additional support for the mortality effect estimate we had been using to estimate the cost-effectiveness of this program and increased our confidence that nets work well in the specific locations that would be funded by this grant. To corroborate these results, we contracted with an independent researcher to replicate our analysis; we are currently reviewing results and also intend to submit our work for peer review.

DRC’s malaria burden is among the highest of any location where we’ve funded nets

The areas of DRC we expect to be covered by this grant have among the highest malaria mortality rates in the absence of ITNs for children under five of any geography where we’ve funded net campaigns in recent years: 0.88%, compared to, for example, 0.73% in our recent grant for nets in Nigeria and 0.47% in Côte d’Ivoire. DRC has a relatively high all-cause mortality rate for children and the highest estimated share of deaths due to malaria among these geographies.

However, we were uncertain about that value for DRC, as it is based on a mortality model that relies on limited empirical malaria mortality data. Because of that, over the course of this grant investigation we worked to triangulate additional sources of information to come up with our best estimate of the true value.

We used three sources of data for our calculation of all-cause mortality:

• Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease (GBD) program, a large collaborative research effort that estimates the prevalence, incidence, and mortality of health conditions.
• United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME), a collaboration of UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank Group, and the UN Population Division that compiles censuses, surveys, and vital registration data to create mortality estimates.
• 2024 Demographic and Health Surveys survey in DRC, an in-person survey that gathers information from households about health, nutrition, and mortality.

We then used GBD and UN IGME data for our estimates of direct malaria deaths. We think the data is imprecise, so we sought out information from additional sources:

• Health surveys in DRC, including Demographic and Health Surveys and UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), consistently report high levels of malaria prevalence in DRC.[8]
• DRC has a climate favorable for year-round malaria—nearly the entire population lives in areas with stable malaria transmission for eight to 12 months per year.[9]
• We spoke with a number of DRC-based experts and clinicians, and they consistently cited malaria as a significant driver of mortality in DRC.
• A study that conducted tissue sampling, one strategy for determining cause of death in many low- and middle-income countries, found that malaria was a cause in around 43% of deaths in Sierra Leone (a similar rural context with high malaria transmission), which is broadly similar to our estimate of 56% for DRC.[10]

Together, these sources of information lead us to be confident that malaria is a significant cause of child mortality in DRC. That increased confidence, in turn, led us to make a larger grant that included provinces with estimated cost-effectiveness closer to our funding threshold.

Existing funding can’t cover nationwide campaigns

Our research for this grant found that despite the need, the available funding for DRC was insufficient to ensure that all areas had net campaigns. The Global Fund is the largest malaria funder in the world; it has a policy of providing no more than 10% of its malaria funding allocation to any one country. Due to this cap, limited funding from other donors, and the high burden of disease, there remains a significant need for nationwide campaigns that GiveWell’s support addresses.

We have high confidence in AMF’s ability to help fill this gap. GiveWell has funded net campaigns through AMF since 2012, and we know it is very experienced at procuring nets and supporting their delivery in DRC, where it has been working for more than a decade. We also spoke with government officials, staff from the organization that distributes the nets, and with other funders, all of whom told us that AMF is a welcome and constructive partner in DRC.

Why we’re funding more frequent net distributions

Because nets in DRC degrade quickly, we chose to fund more frequent net campaigns in up to five provinces where children are at higher risk of dying from malaria.[11] We expect campaigns in those areas to take place in 2027 and 2029, 24 months apart rather than 30 months.

In most countries with substantial malaria burden, nets are distributed every 36 months. Because field durability studies found that nets in DRC degrade more quickly, the DRC government aims to provide net campaigns every 30 months.[12] Our analysis of Demographic and Health Survey data also provided us with additional information about how long nets in DRC provide protection from malaria, supporting the earlier research that nets in DRC degrade as much as a year before they are replaced through new distributions.

We assessed net degradation by looking at how the number of children sleeping under nets changed over time, as we believe that this decline in net use is related to nets wearing out and no longer being usable. The net durability studies we have reviewed support this understanding, as does our analysis showing that the number of households owning a net decreases at a similar rate and direct data on net condition from AMF’s post-distribution monitoring. In the months immediately after a net campaign, we found that more than 80% of children under one year old slept under a net. By two years after a distribution, that number had declined to around 50%. And by three years after a campaign, predicted net use is approximately 20%, leaving children at much greater risk of contracting and dying from malaria.

How we’re increasing impact through research

For more than a decade, GiveWell has been at the forefront of malaria prevention, and the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team allowed us to expand that work even further through this grant. Our grant to support nets in DRC is just one part of our efforts to cost-effectively direct substantially more donor funding. 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.

The intensive grant investigation process increased our confidence in the effectiveness of the nets, improved our understanding of how long nets provide protection, and reduced our uncertainty about malaria mortality in DRC, leading us to make a larger grant than we had in the past and to fund more frequent campaigns in some areas. We are excited about the increased impact we expect as a result of these changes and hope to publish more details about our grant investigation, including the full analysis we did of a prior DRC nets grant.

We appreciate the work that AMF, the implementing partners, and other funders supporting the DRC nets campaigns are doing to reduce the number of children who die from malaria in DRC. And we are especially grateful for the trust and generosity of our donors who make all of our grantmaking possible.

The interactive visualizations were produced in Datawrapper by Kavya Beheraj.

The post The Research behind Our $276 Million Grant for Malaria Nets in DRC appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

This grant, which involved a more rigorous investigation process than most, is part of a larger story about scaling our team and systems to handle substantially more funding while deepening our research rigor. Last year, we directed more than $400 million to highly cost-effective programs to save and improve lives and, this year, we expect our grantmaking to approach, and possibly exceed, $1 billion. This increase in grantmaking aims to meet global needs faster and more effectively.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Alex Bowles about the questions the team set out to answer during the grant investigation.

Elie and Alex discuss:

• Assessing the impact of insecticide-treated nets in DRC: GiveWell usually estimates a program’s cost-effectiveness and impact by analyzing academic evidence, particularly randomized trials, and making a number of adjustments. Because of our growing capacity, we were able to do something new for this grant: We tested our assumptions about DRC’s past net campaigns by drawing on two new, independent lines of evidence. First, we analyzed a recent national survey, which showed a reduction in malaria infections close to what we had predicted. Second, we commissioned a firm based in DRC to interview households and community leaders. Those interviews confirmed records about nets received and provided information about the challenges of conducting net campaigns in DRC. Taken together, this more robust approach increased our confidence that nets work well and are likely to reach intended households in the locations funded by this grant.
• Planning and coordinating at scale: This grant is nearly three times the size of our previous largest grant (also to AMF) and is concentrated in one country rather than being spread across several. The grant commits funds at the beginning of a multi-year planning cycle, which we think will make these campaigns easier to plan. It also aims to ensure that campaigns happen across all 26 of DRC’s provinces, in some cases on an expedited timeline. This shift in our funding approach makes close coordination with AMF and other partners—including the Global Fund, which is funding much of the net distribution, and the national malaria program—even more important than before.
• Rethinking how often nets are distributed: In most countries, nets are distributed every three years, but evidence shows that nets wear out more quickly in DRC, in part because of the climate. Our analysis of national survey data, net durability studies, and AMF’s post-distribution monitoring suggests that nets in DRC last roughly 18 to 24 months. DRC had already shortened its campaign cycle, aiming to distribute nets every 30 months. With the support of the government, GiveWell is supporting net campaigns every 24 months in several provinces with high rates of malaria transmission, and funding evidence gathering so we can learn whether more frequent net campaigns is a cost-effective strategy for further reducing malaria rates. We think this approach will help further prevent malaria and potentially save more lives.

A larger, more experienced team enabled us to investigate this grant more deeply than we could have even two years ago—looking back at past grants to assess their estimated impact and asking important questions about the challenges of implementing such a large program. The same capacity that allowed us to research this grant, which we expect to save tens of thousands of lives, is also helping us look ahead to newer strategies that could save even more lives in the future.

Visit our All Grants Fund and Top Charities 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 August 14, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Announcing Our Largest Grant to Date appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

When we published our last podcast episode on family planning, GiveWell had made only a couple of small grants. Since then, we’ve made a number of additional grants totaling around $20 million, exemplifying how our growing research capacity and expertise enable us to expand into new areas. By doing so, we aim to move more donor funding faster to global health programs where it can do extraordinary good.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera about the family planning programming we’ve funded over the past year, how we’ve structured our grant portfolio, and what we’re hoping to learn.

Elie and Dilhan discuss:

• Funding across the family planning system: Providing people with family planning resources requires a three-tiered system: (1) purchasing contraceptives, (2) moving them through the supply chain to health facilities, and (3) delivering services to clients. We have made grants at all three levels. For example, we recommended a grant for contraceptive procurement through UNFPA Supplies, which works in dozens of countries, addressing a chronic shortfall that deepened after US government cuts. We also approved a one-year grant to MSI Reproductive Choices to help move supplies from national warehouses to local health facilities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, and Zambia. By funding across all three levels rather than at a single point, GiveWell aims to identify the areas of greatest need where additional funding could do the most good.
• Reaching people with limited access: Many people in low- and middle-income countries have limited access to modern contraception. GiveWell has made two grants aiming to increase access at the local level, each taking a different approach. The first supports MSI Reproductive Choices’ mobile outreach program, which we are funding in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Small teams, typically two nurses and a driver, travel to communities identified as having limited access to services. The nurses offer a group information session and individual counseling, after which people who are interested can obtain a range of contraceptive methods, including long-acting options like implants and IUDs that health workers at nearby facilities often aren’t trained to administer. The second supports Lafiya, which operates in northern Nigeria, where modern contraceptive use is among the lowest in the world. Lafiya trains nurses, midwives, and community health workers who already live in these communities to provide family planning counselling, short-term contraceptives, and referrals for other methods. By funding both approaches, we hope to learn more about differing strategies for delivering family planning and the programs’ cost-effectiveness, potentially leading to opportunities to help people in need even more.
• Building evidence alongside the grants: There are relatively few randomized trials of family planning programs and limited rigorous evidence on the specific programs we’re funding. As a result, we have a number of uncertainties. We’re particularly interested in getting better answers to the following questions: Does providing family planning commodities actually increase use, or does it substitute for what people would’ve gotten another way? Do the commodities we help procure actually reach facilities? And to what extent are people making informed choices about whether or not they want to take up contraception? We’ve built learning opportunities into all of our family planning grants, including, for example, separately funding Innovations for Poverty Action to conduct independent surveys of clients and households in the areas where MSI’s mobile outreach program works.

GiveWell’s research and grantmaking for family planning programs is still in its early stages, but it reflects a strategy across many of our newer grantmaking areas: directing donations to help people now, while generating the evidence needed to direct more funding to highly cost-effective programs in the future.

Read more about how we’re thinking about family planning mobile outreach, visit our All Grants Fund page to learn how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for our latest updates.

This episode was recorded on July 22, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

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