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.

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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.

The post Finding the Bottlenecks in Family Planning Access appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Casting a Wider Net for Cost-Effective Programs

Most of GiveWell’s grantmaking sits in a small number of areas we’ve studied for years—malaria, nutrition, vaccines, water, and livelihoods. But as our research team’s capacity has grown, so has the range of cause areas we investigate. We believe there could be other highly cost-effective interventions, and our new areas research subteam is working hard to find them.

Take amoxicillin, a common antibiotic used to treat childhood pneumonia. In many health facilities in low- and middle-income settings, medicine stock is still tracked by hand and counted about once a month, so staff often don’t know a drug has run out until a child needs it and it isn’t there. One of the grants featured in a recent GiveWell podcast episode aims to prevent shortages before they happen by funding an electronic supply chain management system to track medicine supplies in real time in Laos.

In the episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dan Brown, who leads our new areas research subteam. They discuss the grant in Laos and two others: the first provides early support for a new, low-maintenance device that produces medical oxygen, and the second funds two studies that will help us better understand a program that trains caregivers in practices that support newborn health in India.

The three grants look very different, but they are grounded in the same principles of rigor and truth-seeking that apply to all our work. By focusing on cost-effectiveness, evidence, and learning, we think the work of our new areas research subteam could lead to many more lives saved and improved over time. Read more on our blog.

Scaling Our Impact, with Support from a $1 Billion Commitment

Halfway through this year, we’ve already surpassed our 2025 grantmaking total, with more than $400 million in grants committed so far to save and improve lives. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach, and potentially exceed, $1 billion this year, and our team is working toward a future in which our grantmaking could be several times this year’s scale.

This growth is possible because of years spent building a research team that can find more, and bigger, high-impact opportunities. It’s also possible because of donors who share our mission to help people in need as much as we can.

We’re excited to share that Coefficient Giving has increased its near-term funding commitment for GiveWell grants to $1 billion to support the continued scaling of our work. This commitment is both extraordinary and timely. Near-term needs continue to far surpass our fundraising expectations, and we are actively working to raise more funds to support a growing set of cost-effective opportunities to help people. Read the announcement on our blog.

Tackling Diarrheal Disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan

Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death for children under five, killing more than 400,000 children every year. GiveWell has funded several programs to prevent and treat diarrhea, and we recently made a grant to support the implementation and evaluation of WASHmobile—a water, sanitation, and hygiene program developed by Johns Hopkins University—in DRC and South Sudan.

In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett, who leads our water research subteam, about how WASHmobile works, what prior research tells us about its potential, and what we expect to learn from this grant.

Elie and Erin discuss:

• How WASHmobile works: To reduce the risk of diarrheal disease spreading, WASHmobile identifies children who have been hospitalized with severe diarrhea, delivers handwashing supplies and chlorine tablets to their households, and follows up with phone reminders about safe water practices. Because household members often share the same water source and live in close quarters, treating water and improving hygiene during this critical window can prevent further infections and deaths.
• Navigating uncertainty in fragile contexts: WASHmobile is being implemented in South Kivu (DRC) and Jonglei State (South Sudan), where active armed conflict, severe flooding, and large displaced populations make program implementation challenging. Even with a substantial chance of program failure built into our modeling, we estimate the program could be highly cost-effective because disease burden in these areas is so high.
• Building learning into the grant: Roughly half of the grant funds implementation, and half funds evaluation and data collection to help us test key assumptions in our cost-effectiveness model. In DRC, we’re funding a randomized controlled trial that will be conducted alongside implementation to measure the program’s effect on hospital admissions for diarrhea among children under five. In South Sudan, where a full trial wasn’t feasible, we’re funding mortality surveys and operational monitoring to better understand baseline mortality and whether the program is being implemented as intended.

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: To be determined
What: Sourcing and funding a portfolio of promising early-stage water quality and access innovations
Who: The DIV Fund
Total: $5 million
How it works: The DIV Fund, an evidence-driven innovation fund that tests and scales cost-effective global development solutions, will use this grant to source and fund early-stage water quality and access programs through an open request for proposals (RFP). While the RFP is open to all sectors, GiveWell’s grant will only apply to water interventions, with the goal of building a pipeline of high-potential, cost-effective opportunities that we could consider for future funding.
Why this grant: Unsafe water causes more than 750,000 deaths each year. Since 2022, GiveWell has directed more than $150 million to water quality interventions, primarily chlorination programs, which we consider among the most cost-effective water interventions available. This grant is meant to widen that effort by helping surface a broader range of high-impact water opportunities that GiveWell can evaluate for future funding at scale.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s Unrestricted Fund

Hiring Announcements

Featured Role: Senior Philanthropy Advisor
We’re hiring a Senior Philanthropy Advisor to manage and advise a portfolio of our largest donors. This role will help major philanthropists scale their giving to high-impact causes and help GiveWell direct significantly more funding to the most cost-effective programs we can identify to save and improve lives.

As a Senior Philanthropy Advisor, you’ll build long-term relationships with our largest donors, lead fundraising projects that help our philanthropy function scale, and serve as a strategic advisor to leadership.

If you’re an experienced relationship-builder who is excited to connect major philanthropists to high-impact giving, 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 link and encourage them to apply.

• Senior Program Officer
• Program Officer
• Senior Researchers (subteam-specific roles available)
• Senior Accountant
• Staff Accountant

Visit our Jobs page to see all open positions.

Partner Roundup

• Read Malaria Consortium’s new study on ways to improve delivery of seasonal malaria chemoprevention in complex settings.
• Learn about the 86-year-old community health worker helping vitamin A supplementation reach children across Cameroon through Helen Keller Intl’s program.
• Watch Giving What We Can’s new short film on the history of the global fight against malaria.

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 July 2026 Updates appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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

Elie and Erin discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s driving our increased grantmaking

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

Team growth

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

More experience

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

Larger grants

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

Responding to cuts in foreign aid

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

Lowering our cost-effectiveness threshold

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

Our need for more funding

Coefficient Giving’s commitment comes at a particularly important time for two reasons. First, the needs remain enormous. More than four million young children die in low- and middle-income countries every year¹Our World in Data, “Number of child deaths,” 2024, shows 2.73 million deaths of children under five in low-income countries and 1.60 million in lower-middle-income countries, totaling 4.33 million in 2024.—and most of those deaths are preventable.²World Bank Group, “Mortality rate, under-5 (per 1,000 live births)” shows a mortality rate for children under five of 40.8 for low- and middle-income countries and a child mortality rate of 5.1 for high-income countries in 2024. If children under five in low- and middle-income countries were to die at the child mortality rate of high-income countries rather than at their current rate, representing the potential effect of high-income country conditions existing across low- and middle-income countries, 87.5% of child deaths in low- and middle-income countries would be averted: 5.1 / 40.8 = 12.5%, or 1 − 0.125 = 87.5% percent averted. Support from our donors has helped us make progress, but so much more remains to be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elie and Dan discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

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Growing Our Largest Research Area: Malaria

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

Among our efforts, we are:

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

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

“Looking Back to Give Better” Webinar Recap

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

Expanding Our Search for Cost-Effective Ways to Reduce Poverty

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

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

Elie and Adam discuss:

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

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

Grant Spotlight

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

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

Hiring Announcements

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

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

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

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

Partner Roundup

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

Comments or Questions?

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

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