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

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

Elie and Adam discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding Evidence to Improve Future Grantmaking Decisions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identifying Ways to Increase Coverage of Our Core Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding Our Portfolio Beyond Our Core Programs

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Why We’re Funding the Search for New Water Innovations

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

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

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

About the DIV Fund’s Request for Proposals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Looking Back to Give Better

GiveWell’s research doesn’t end once we’ve made a grant. We evaluate a subset of completed grants, comparing what we thought would happen to what actually took place, then try to use what we learn to improve our future funding decisions. Over the past year, our growing research capacity has enabled us to expand this work and publish comprehensive “lookbacks” for select grants.

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

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

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

GiveWell CEO Named to TIME100 Philanthropy List

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

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

Behind the Analysis: Assessing Past Malaria Nets Grants

A recent lookback on grants GiveWell made to fund insecticide-treated net distributions supported by the Against Malaria Foundation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is one of our most thorough yet. We drew on multiple independent data sources, funded qualitative interviews to gather more information, and conducted a novel empirical analysis to deepen our confidence.

In our recent podcast episode, based on a conversation originally aired on GiveWell’s internal podcast for staff, GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld, Chief Research and Program Officer Teryn Mattox, Program Director Alex Cohen, and Researcher Steven Brownstone examine how we conducted the lookback, what we found, and how what we learned may shape our future nets grantmaking.

Elie, Teryn, Alex, and Steven discuss:

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

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

New RFI: Malaria Pilot Programs and Research

Submissions due June 24

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

Organizations can apply through one of two submission tracks:

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

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

Grant Spotlight

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

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

To learn more, check out the grant page.

Hiring Announcements

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

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

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

Partner Roundup

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

Comments or Questions?

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

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

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

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

Elie and Andrew discuss:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the past several years, GiveWell has doubled the size of our research team to deepen and broaden our search for highly impactful programs. Our 60 researchers are now distributed among 11 subteams that cover a number of global health and development cause areas, as well as core research needs.

Below you’ll find a summary of the key approaches each subteam is using this year to find new opportunities to help people in need as much as we can.

• Malaria
  • Antimalarial Medicines
  • Vector Control
  • Malaria Cross-Cutting Research
• Nutrition
• Vaccination
• Water
• Livelihoods
• New Areas
• Cross-Cutting Research
• Research Support and Operations
  • Research Operations
  • Commons

Malaria

People: Marinella Capriati, Zoe Hartman

Malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when people are bitten by infected mosquitoes, is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of the approximately 600,000 malaria deaths worldwide each year.¹See the WHO fact sheet on malaria, which states “Globally in 2024, there were an estimated 282 million malaria cases and 610 000 malaria deaths in 80 countries…the WHO African Region was home to 95% of malaria cases (265 million) and 95% (579,000) of malaria deaths. Children under 5 accounted for about 75% of all malaria deaths in the Region.” 75% * 95% = 71%. While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team are allowing us to take on this challenge now in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago. Our malaria research subteam, with 15 people, is the largest of our research teams and is divided into three subteams.

Antimalarial Medicines

People: Sarah Tougher, Robin Dey, Sam Aman

The Antimalarial Medicines subteam focuses on medicines that either prevent or treat infections from malaria parasites. Prevention and treatment are managed as an integrated portfolio because they use the same products, and programming and policy decisions in one area have direct implications for the other. For example, decisions about which antimalarial to use in one intervention may have potential implications for drug resistance in another. In 2026, the team plans to focus on the following:

• Streamlining research on Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program.This is one of our Top Charities, which are highly cost-effective programs that we know well. As a result, we only plan to focus on a small number of high-value questions in our upcoming investigations. By doing so, we hope to reserve capacity for expansion in other areas.
• Looking for cost-effective opportunities to diversify our SMC portfolio. We plan to continue to work with Malaria Consortium for the majority of SMC programming we support, while exploring opportunities to expand coverage and learn more about the relative strengths and weaknesses of different partners.
• Identifying promising chemoprevention approaches outside the Sahel. The team recently launched a request for proposals that will likely include pilots of perennial malaria chemoprevention, post-malaria discharge, and intermittent preventive treatment in school-aged children as well as strategies to optimize the delivery of SMC.
• Finding cost-effective ways to support malaria treatment. Prior to changes to the global funding landscape last year, we had believed that cost-effective opportunities to support malaria case management were largely covered by existing funding streams. Since that time, we have identified and funded existing gaps to support case management, and we will continue to look for cost-effective opportunities to bolster access to treatment.

Malaria Vector Control

People: Alex Bowles, Jenna Amlani, Rosie Bettle, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie, Nat Puapattanakajorn

The Malaria Vector Control subteam researches and funds cost-effective programs that prevent malaria infections and deaths by targeting the mosquitoes that transmit the disease. To date, most of the subteam’s work has supported the procurement and distribution of insecticide-treated nets through campaigns. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Looking for large potential gaps in insecticide-treated net coverage in areas with high malaria burden. We are focusing on potential cost-effective nets campaigns in high-burden areas, where we believe that aid cuts may have increased existing gaps. We will continue to work with Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s Top Charities, while considering additional implementers, such as Malaria Consortium, whom we have funded to support net campaigns in parts of Nigeria.
• Identifying promising vector control approaches beyond net campaigns that could eventually absorb significant funding. We plan to investigate routine net distribution, spatial repellents, and potentially insecticide-treated baby wraps. While we do not expect these efforts to result in large grants this year, we may scale support for cost-effective programs in the future.
• Conducting assessments of the organizational capabilities of our key implementing partners. This includes Malaria Consortium and Against Malaria Foundation. We will also review our approach to grant investigations to ensure efficient and effective processes. As we ramp up our annual grantmaking, we are looking for ways to streamline our research while maintaining our rigor.

Malaria Cross-Cutting Research

People: John Macke, James Watson, Kartik Sharma, Lucy McNamara, Giselle Gray

The Malaria Cross-Cutting Research subteam aims to improve GiveWell’s malaria grantmaking by asking high-level research questions, particularly focusing on ways that our current approach may be wrong and other strategies we could try. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Soliciting high-quality research and pilot opportunities across malaria that we wouldn’t be able to find through normal grantmaking channels. We have launched a request for proposals looking for cost-effective opportunities in vector control, antimalarial medicines, and cross-cutting malaria research.
• Looking for promising malaria interventions beyond nets and SMC. We will explore a number of opportunities, such as a malaria rebound study and market shaping for rapid diagnostic tests. We will also conduct quick evidence assessments on interventions we are less familiar with and work with the CHAI Incubator to develop new opportunities.
• Seeking to improve the accuracy of our cost-effectiveness estimates for nets and SMC. Because most of our significant modeling insights in the past emerged from new perspectives rather than refinements to specific parameters, we will focus this year on sourcing outside perspectives and alternative strategies for addressing our uncertainties.
• Working to articulate and defend the key premises behind our malaria grantmaking in a way that invites external feedback. We aim to publish three reports on important uncertainties or big-picture questions, such as why malaria hasn’t declined despite more than $1 billion in GiveWell funding for malaria prevention.

Nutrition

People: Alice Redfern, Andrew Martin, Catherine Hollander, Jack Clift, Jordan Hebert, Madison Stieg, Stephan Guyenet, Zach McLeod

Nutritional deficiencies are common in low- and middle-income countries and can cause a variety of symptoms, including increased susceptibility to infection and death. The Nutrition subteam researches and funds cost-effective programs to address problems like vitamin A deficiency, anemia, and acute malnutrition. We expect that up to half of the team’s grantmaking in 2026 will be renewal grants; the rest will be new grantmaking in areas where we are in the process of developing program pipelines. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Considering opportunities to expand vitamin A supplementation (VAS). VAS programs in most countries where it is cost-effective (because of high vitamin A deficiency and child mortality rates) are already funded by us or other donors. We plan to explore remaining promising locations to determine whether to expand or shift to steady-state renewals of existing cost-effective programs. We’re also exploring ways to improve our estimates of VAS impact through surveys or a new trial.
• Looking for cost-effective opportunities to reduce the burden of anemia in Africa. We currently fund programs in India that provide iron supplements or fortify staple foods with iron. While Africa also has a high anemia burden, we are concerned that supplementation could be less effective because of higher baseline inflammation in the region or could worsen malaria infections. We’re completing research to address these concerns and determine whether to seek opportunities in Africa or expand support in South Asia. After receiving results related to iron bioavailability, we will consider grantmaking for multiple micronutrient supplementation.
• Pursuing ways to reduce the cost of acute malnutrition treatment without compromising effectiveness. While there is a very large unmet need for malnutrition treatment, most programs we have identified fall below our cost-effectiveness threshold. We plan to conduct a listening tour with implementers and other funders to identify promising approaches for reducing costs and expect to fund some pilot grants to test them.
• Exploring opportunities in other areas, such as cardiovascular disease prevention. Given capacity constraints, we’re taking a light-touch approach to pursuing these opportunities, such as following existing leads and outsourcing scoping work. We see this work as building a pipeline for grantmaking in future years.

Vaccination

People: Natalie Crispin, Isabel Vasquez, Sarah Carson, Vicky Yu

Vaccines are very effective at preventing deadly diseases and they receive substantial global funding. Because of this, in most low- and middle-income countries the vaccines children need are available, yet not all children receive them. We currently have one Top Charity, New Incentives, focused on providing caregiver incentives and a growing portfolio of grants supporting programs that provide vaccination outreach to remote communities. We expect to use what we learn from the operational and impact data generated by those programs to improve our grantmaking and identify opportunities where additional funding can meaningfully increase vaccination rates and save lives. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Supporting vaccination outreach programs to reach the lowest coverage communities. Our 2025 request for proposals confirmed that there are organizations ready to implement large-scale programs to send vaccinators to difficult-to-reach communities, and we made grants to start five new programs in five countries. In 2026, we have run a new request for proposals and plan to make at least as many grants to outreach programs in 2026 as we did in 2025. We’ll assess the impact of these programs through independent third-party coverage surveys.
• Looking for cost-effective vaccination programs that provide caregiver incentives. New Incentives, a GiveWell Top Charity, has shown that small cash incentives for caregivers can meaningfully increase coverage. We would like to expand to additional implementers, so we plan to launch a request for information seeking pilot programs that could iterate on operational design and build implementer experience.
• Exploring support for malaria vaccines and other vaccination opportunities. We also expect to explore whether there are cost-effective opportunities to support the rollout of malaria vaccines and, if capacity allows, to pursue some other early-stage ideas, such as addressing supply chain gaps and research and development on improved technology for vaccine delivery.

Water

People: Erin Crossett, Karin Mason, Megan Morris

More than a billion people around the world lack access to uncontaminated drinking water, and according to the World Health Organization, more than 500,000 people die each year from diseases caused by contaminated water.²See the WHO fact sheet on drinking water, which states “Microbiologically contaminated drinking water can transmit diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio and is estimated to cause approximately 505 000 diarrhoeal deaths each year.” This year, we expect to pivot from a narrow focus on chlorination to explore alternative treatment technologies and delivery models. This means accepting higher uncertainty in exchange for the potential to unlock high-impact opportunities that need substantial amounts of funding. Our strategy is intentionally fluid; we’re prioritizing rapid learning through quick evidence assessments and expert consultations. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Looking for promising alternative water treatment technologies or delivery models. We’re investigating alternatives such as inline ultraviolet light purification, filtration, and direct delivery of clean water (often called water kiosks). While we expect to continue to fund chlorination programs, we plan to invest more time searching for other promising areas. Depending on what we find, we may run another request for information to identify implementers for a given intervention area.
• Partnering with multilateral development banks to add water quality treatments onto existing infrastructure projects. The goal of this strategic partnership is to determine if we can include water quality treatment as part of existing or planned large-scale piped water infrastructure projects. If this works, it could be a very large funding channel.
• Investing in measurement and market shaping. We’re supporting “enablers” of impact. For example, we plan to fund programs to improve chemical contamination testing strips and to use prizes to incentivize the development of low-cost, accurate chlorine sensors, which could potentially increase the cost-effectiveness of our in-line chlorination portfolio.
• Seeking new funding mechanisms. We will look for new ways to move money that set us up well for future years by building out our early-stage pipeline. We’re exploring regranting opportunities and establishing a water program incubator to scope and pilot new interventions.
• Improving adherence and cost-effectiveness of chlorination grants. Chlorination still seems intuitively promising—it’s cheap, widely available, averts mortality, and neglected relative to water access—but we received significant negative updates on adherence from external coverage surveys of Evidence Action’s water quality programs in Uganda and Malawi. Our chlorine pilots are ongoing, with results expected in 2027. If results from external monitoring and evaluation of these programs are promising, there could be sizable cost-effective opportunities to expand.

Livelihoods

People: Adam Salisbury

In late 2025, we began to focus more attention on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. Our goal for the next two years is to test the hypothesis that GiveWell ought to expand its portfolio of livelihoods grants. We’re planning to cover a lot of ground in 2026, prioritizing program areas that could unlock significant funding opportunities if the general case for philanthropic investment seems promising. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Evaluating the broader economic effects of cash transfers. Cash transfers entail giving cash support to households in extreme poverty to help them meet their basic needs. In low-income countries, there’s robust evidence that these programs improve food consumption and housing quality, and more recent evidence suggests they can also benefit the local economy.³See more on cash transfers in our GiveDirectly Cash for Poverty Relief intervention report here. We will assess how those effects, including effects on prices and wages, relate to the optimal size, frequency, and saturation of cash transfers across different implementation contexts.
• Generating evidence on and seeking to support the expansion of cost-effective ultra-poor graduation programs. Ultra-poor graduation programs typically deliver a bundled intervention of productive assets, training, a short-term cash stipend, and access to savings vehicles with the aim of creating a sustainable path out of poverty. RCT evidence shows that the programs, while expensive, improve short-run consumption and that the gains persist after the intervention ends.⁴See key evidence for ultra-poor graduation programs in Banerjee et al. 2021 and Banerjee et al. 2015. We’re interested in whether we can generate evidence on and support the scale-up of newer, more cost-effective variants.
• Assessing whether new ways to deliver or target microfinance programs are cost-effective. RCTs of microfinance programs in the 2000s showed only small average effects on business profits and income. However, recent evidence suggests more promising results from newer programs, such as those earmarked for productive assets. We plan to investigate the possibility of generating additional evidence and explore whether philanthropic funding for microfinance programs is viable.

New Areas

People: Dan Brown, Daniel Issing, Dilhan Perera, Kim Vidal, Meika Ball, Rachel Mitchell

The New Areas subteam researches and funds cost-effective programs in global health and development that fall outside the scope of the other research subteams, such as diarrhea treatment and screening, and treatment for tuberculosis or syphilis. This year, the subteam aims to increase its grantmaking by about 20% over 2025 while broadening the cause areas and types of intervention that GiveWell funds. To accomplish this, we will be intentionally accepting higher levels of risk and uncertainty. We believe doing so will reduce the chance of missing highly cost-effective programs that need significant future funding and will provide additional opportunities to learn. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Expanding support for cause areas we’ve identified as promising. We will look for additional highly cost-effective opportunities to support programs in areas we have already identified as core to our work, such as HIV treatment, family planning, and health systems strengthening. In each of those areas, we see promising fundamentals: a range of potentially highly cost-effective programs, strong implementers, and significant funding gaps exacerbated by global funding uncertainties. We also will consider renewing and scaling programs in other areas we’ve previously funded, such as oral rehydration solution and zinc to treat diarrhea.
• Searching for highly cost-effective programs in cause areas GiveWell hasn’t previously funded much or at all. We’re spending significantly more time on emerging cause areas in 2026 compared to 2025. This could include medical oxygen, tuberculosis, AI applications to global health, drug quality, and noncommunicable diseases including hypertension.
• Considering additional grant and partnership types. We’re exploring funding mechanisms that are less familiar to GiveWell, such as contributing to pooled funding and supporting market shaping instruments. We’ll also consider partnering with additional organizations to develop incubators to diversify and strengthen our pipeline of new programs.

Cross-Cutting Research

People: Alex Cohen, Brendan Phillips, Brian Gill, Jane Fortson, Katie Skoff, Mark Walsh, Steven Brownstone

The Cross-Cutting team supports research quality across GiveWell. As the organization scales this year—making more grants to more programs—we’re working to maintain the quality of our work and respond to important research questions that apply across our grantmaking. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Hiring and training new researchers. GiveWell plans to substantially increase the number of people on its research team in 2026. Our top priority for the year is leading training to ensure new hires meet high standards and become productive quickly. Everything else GiveWell intends to accomplish depends on having enough well-trained people.
• Conducting grant lookbacks. Our growing research capacity has recently enabled us to expand this step in our research process and publish comprehensive evaluations for select grants. Through this work, we aim to advance our understanding of the true impact of our funding, transparently share what we learn, and continue improving the cost-effectiveness of donations.
• Gathering local insights in Nigeria. We are currently running four pilots in Nigeria to pressure-test our desk research with local insights that can validate or challenge our research. In 2026, we’ll analyze these pilots and decide what to continue supporting. If the Nigeria work proves useful, we may expand our local insights work to DRC.
• Supporting monitoring and evaluation efforts. In 2025, we pressure-tested our monitoring and evaluation efforts to identify gaps in our work for our top six grantmaking areas, including our four Top Charities, water quality interventions, and malnutrition treatment programs. In 2026, we’ll take steps to ensure that the top recommendations from that red teaming work are implemented.
• Exploring the use of AI tools. We’re rolling out AI tools for common use cases, such as conducting critical literature reviews, and enabling research team members to use AI for their own use cases. We’re also systematically tracking how well AI does at our work. Our goal is to identify concrete ways we can use AI to make our work more efficient and prepare for future jumps in AI capability.

Research Support and Operations

Two of our research subteams are devoted to supporting the smooth running of the research team as a whole. Our Research Operations subteam provides logistical and knowledge management support. Our Commons team vets research materials and provides other research support as needed.

Research Operations

People: Hannah Bell, Destiny Clark, Kaitlynn Lagman, Matt Wang

The Research Operations subteam provides support for team tools and processes, including forecasting, project tracking infrastructure, international travel, external feedback on our grant processes, and internal coordination. The subteam plans to focus on maintaining and improving research team processes and resources to accompany research team growth, including:

• Hiring and onboarding additional project managers for the research team
• Collecting, organizing, and analyzing detailed grantmaking data
• Iterating on grantmaking and research processes, with an eye toward smoothing processes at a larger scale
• Improving communication and coordination between GiveWell and external partners
• Strengthening internal knowledge management, including grants management

Commons

People: Nicole Zok, Kameron Smith, Ally Rome, Andrew Ligon, Annie Barnett, Beatrix Swanson, Brooke Reaves, Gurmukh Singh, Jack Shangraw, Meghna Ray, Peter Namie, Sophia Emmons-Bell

The Commons subteam supports grantmaking volume, quality, and transparency across GiveWell by vetting research materials, including grant pages and cost-effectiveness models, and by providing other research support. This year, the subteam will focus on:

• Hiring and onboarding additional research analysts
• Coordinating with other research subteams to unearth and prioritize high-impact opportunities for research support
• Vetting cost-effectiveness models for larger grants earlier in the grant investigation process
• Addressing the backlog of grant pages that have not yet been published
• Experimenting with AI to improve the efficiency and quality of vetting

The post How We’re Searching for the Best Ways to Help in 2026 appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

A recent lookback on grants GiveWell made to fund insecticide-treated net distributions supported by the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) illustrates the growing capacity of GiveWell’s research team. We drew on multiple independent data sources, funded qualitative interviews to gather more information, and conducted a novel empirical analysis to deepen our confidence.

In this episode, based on a conversation originally aired on GiveWell’s internal podcast for staff,* GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld provides additional context while GiveWell’s Chief Research and Program Officer Teryn Mattox dives deep into the details with Program Director Alex Cohen and Researcher Steven Brownstone, examining how we conducted the lookback, what we found, and how what we learned may shape our future nets grantmaking.

Elie, Teryn, Alex, and Steven discuss:

• A more expansive and rigorous approach to evaluating past grants: This lookback draws on three independent quantitative sources—AMF’s monitoring data, a recent Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) conducted in the DRC, and an original survey commissioned by GiveWell—alongside qualitative research involving in-depth interviews with people involved in DRC’s net distribution system, from health zone administrators to village focus groups.
• Conducting a novel mortality analysis using DHS microdata: Because net campaigns roll out on staggered schedules across DRC’s provinces, we were able to use the timing of children’s births relative to the date of local net campaigns as a natural experiment. We compared mortality risk for children based on when they were born, and thus the length of time they had protection from a net, and found that the net campaigns reduced the risk of death by around a quarter. That finding provides additional support for the mortality effect estimate we use in our cost-effectiveness models.
• What qualitative research revealed: Interviewers asked people across five provinces in DRC whether households received nets and whether households were using nets—and in cases where they either didn’t receive nets or weren’t using them, why not. Although we heard some anecdotes of misuse or diversion of nets, the data suggested overall that the nets are highly valued by the communities receiving them.
• How durability data could inform campaign design: Our analysis of DHS data confirmed earlier research indicating that nets in DRC degrade before they are replaced through new distributions. As a result, it’s possible that changes in DRC like more frequent campaigns or increased support of routine net distribution through other channels may increase protection.

If you’re interested in learning more about grant lookbacks like this one—and how they’re improving our research and shaping our future funding decisions—we invite you to join our next webinar on June 9. Alex Cohen, who was featured in this episode, and Program Director Julie Faller will walk through our lookback process, what we’re learning, and how we’re applying those lessons to help more people. Learn more and register here.

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

Glossary

Because the conversation in this episode first aired as part of GiveWell’s internal podcast for staff, there are a number of names, acronyms, and other terms that are not explained. To make it easier to follow along, we’ve provided a glossary below.

• all-cause mortality. All-cause mortality measures the total number of deaths from any cause in a specific group of people over a specific period of time.
• AMF. The Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s Top Charities, collaborates with national malaria programs and other partner organizations in low- and middle-income countries to distribute insecticide-treated nets.
• CEA. We build cost-effectiveness analyses to assess how much good can be achieved by giving money to a certain program.
• Cox proportional hazards model. The Cox proportional hazards model is used to estimate how much different factors, such as time since an insecticide-treated net campaign, speed up or slow down the time to death. It assigns each factor a “hazard ratio,” which is a multiplier of the baseline risk of dying: a hazard ratio of 2 for smoking means that smokers face double the risk of death at any given moment compared to nonsmokers, all else equal.
• DHS. ​​Demographic and Health Surveys are vast, in-person surveys that ask women to recall their children’s birth and survival histories. This method provides the primary data for mortality estimates in low- and middle-income countries.
• funging. What we call “funging” (from fungibility) refers to the effect of crowding out funding that would have otherwise come from other sources.
• insecticide-treated nets. These nets have been treated with insecticide to deter and kill the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. Distributing insecticide-treated nets, which are then hung over sleeping spaces, can be a cost-effective way of preventing malaria.
• lookbacks. Lookbacks are reviews of past grants published on the GiveWell website that assess how well they’ve met our initial estimates and what we can learn from them.
• Marakuja. Marakuja Kivu Research is a nonprofit organization in DRC that we have contracted with to conduct quantitative and qualitative surveys.
• M&E. GiveWell asks organizations that we fund to share detailed monitoring and evaluation data on their programs to assess the quality of program implementation and whether it is reaching recipients as intended.
• net durability. Insecticide-treated nets decay over time, both through loss of insecticide and physical wear.
• nets team. In internal conversations, this is what we sometimes call our vector control team (see below for definition).
• OnFrontiers. OnFrontiers is a company that sets up interviews with subject matter experts around the world.
• PDM. Post-distribution monitoring data is collected by independent partners funded by AMF. These partners survey a sample of households in the areas targeted by a campaign to assess the presence, usage, and condition of nets over time.
• PLNP. The Programme National de la Lutte contre le Paludisme (or National Malaria Control Program) in DRC plans, coordinates, and implements malaria prevention and treatment strategies.
• PMI. The President’s Malaria Initiative is a US government program to fund malaria prevention and elimination programs.
• regression discontinuity. This is an econometric method that leverages the fact that if outcomes “jump” at a threshold, in this case a geographic border, then the “jump” can be considered the effect of a policy difference across the border.
• STATcompiler indicators. Some indicators derived from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are available pre-calculated on a website run by the DHS called STATcompiler. Cross-referencing against these pre-calculated values is a good way to validate the analysis of the raw data from DHS surveys.
• vector control team. GiveWell’s vector control team is a research subteam within our malaria research team that focuses on interventions that prevent malaria infections and deaths by targeting the mosquitoes that transmit the disease.

The post Podcast Episode 29: Behind the Analysis — Assessing Past Malaria Nets Grants appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

Malaria kills around 600,000 people annually, mostly children under five in Africa.¹Source: Our World in Data To date, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion in donations to malaria prevention programs. As our research capacity grows, this RFI aims to pilot promising malaria prevention strategies and generate evidence to address a range of questions in malaria prevention and epidemiology.

We’d like to reach as many organizations as possible—please share with your network and consider applying!

What We’re Looking to Fund

The first track seeks proposals for pilot programs related to malaria chemoprevention and vector control. We are interested in funding programs that test promising interventions and include a strong research or evaluation component, with the goal of generating evidence to inform our future grantmaking.

Funding decisions will be primarily based on:

1. The likelihood of the program to meet our high cost-effectiveness threshold for funding.
2. The potential to learn from the pilot or program through accompanying monitoring, evaluation, and research.
3. The feasibility of pilot programs to be scaled or replicated in other settings.

The second track seeks standalone research and evaluation proposals with potential to improve GiveWell’s future malaria-focused grantmaking. We call these “value of information” grants—opportunities we fund to try to reduce a key uncertainty and improve our impact estimates, which in turn can inform how we direct funding and help people in need.

Through this track, we are interested in funding research and evaluation on a variety of topics that could help us improve our cost-effectiveness estimates, generate evidence on promising new interventions, or better understand effective strategies for implementing seasonal malaria chemoprevention and insecticide-treated net campaigns.

Funding decisions will be primarily based on:

1. The likelihood of the research findings to impact future funding decisions.
2. The strength and feasibility of the research or evaluation design.
3. The degree to which the proposal aims to maximize impact per dollar spent.

Both tracks focus exclusively on Plasmodium falciparum malaria in African countries with a high burden of malaria. We will not consider proposals focused on low-burden settings, settings outside Africa, or other Plasmodium species. Other decision factors, such as the team’s qualifications, experience, and partnership compatibility with GiveWell, will also be considered in funding decisions.

How to Learn More

We are hosting webinars to answer applicant questions for both RFI tracks:

• Pilot program track: Friday, May 15 at 9:00am ET.
• Research and evaluation track: Monday, May 18 at 9:00am ET.

We hope you will register and join us then! Questions can be submitted via this form or emailed to us at malariarfp@givewell.org.

The post GiveWell Opens RFI for Malaria Pilots and Research appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

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Following Up on Our Grant to MiracleFeet

Much of GiveWell’s grantmaking focuses on preventing child deaths. But many serious health challenges in low- and middle-income countries involve disability, not death. Disability treatment is an area we’ve considered for many years, but these interventions are often complex and require specialized research. As our capacity and expertise have grown, we’ve been able to evaluate and fund programs like clubfoot treatment.

Clubfoot is a congenital condition in which children are born with one or both feet twisted inward and downward. It affects roughly one in 800 newborns globally, and in low- and middle-income countries, only about a fifth of children who need treatment receive it. Left untreated, it causes pain and loss of mobility. But when treated early with the Ponseti method—which involves a series of casts, a minor outpatient surgical procedure, and four to five years of bracing—it can be fully corrected. In 2023, we made a grant to MiracleFeet, an organization that partners with local health facilities and ministries of health to expand access to clubfoot treatment in countries where most children go untreated.

Two GiveWell staff recently traveled to Côte d’Ivoire to see the program firsthand. Over four days, they visited clinics, met with the Ministry of Health and implementing partners, and spoke with caregivers of children receiving clubfoot treatment.

“I have always known that the tangible impact of GiveWell’s work is that people are meaningfully helped out in the world; still, I was stunned by the experience of seeing actual, specific children—dozens of them—receiving transformative care.”
—Maggie Lloydhauser, Senior Philanthropy Advisor

In our latest podcast episode, CEO Elie Hassenfeld and Program Officer Meika Ball discuss what made this grant different from most we fund, what we’ve learned two and a half years in, and reflections Meika and Maggie recorded during their site visit.

Scrutinizing One of Our Longest-Funded Programs

Vitamin A supplementation is one of the programs GiveWell has supported the longest, and it has an unusually strong evidence base for reducing child mortality. Yet, as is the case for most global health programs, the evidence raises complex, unresolved questions. Over the last several years, we’ve expanded our capacity to carefully research these questions.

In our recent podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher Stephan Guyenet about the evidence base for vitamin A supplementation and how GiveWell has improved our cost-effectiveness estimates for the program.

Elie and Stephan cover:

• The evidence base for vitamin A supplementation: Rigorous trials show that vitamin A supplementation can significantly reduce child mortality, but most of these trials were conducted 30 to 40 years ago, and a more recent large trial in India found a much smaller effect.
• How GiveWell worked through the complications: To address our questions about the existing evidence, we conducted further research, including an analysis of the specific diseases for which vitamin A supplementation reduces mortality, a novel dosing-frequency analysis with an outside statistician, and an assessment of possible publication bias.
• What this means for grantmaking: While the trials reported a 19% reduction in mortality for children 6 to 59 months old, we estimate the impact in modern settings is smaller: a 1% to 11% lower risk of death. However, treatment costs are very low, and we’ve learned how to target regions where vitamin A supplementation can be particularly cost-effective. We estimate our most recent grant to Helen Keller Intl is 25 times more cost-effective than our benchmark.

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

Upcoming Webinar: Looking Back to Give Better

Join us for our upcoming webinar, Looking Back to Give Better: How GiveWell Evaluates Its Grantmaking, on Tuesday, June 9. GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld will moderate a conversation with Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller about how we evaluate whether a grant achieved the impact we initially estimated—and how we use those findings to make better impact estimates over time.

Our growing research capacity has recently enabled us to expand this step in our research process and publish comprehensive evaluations for select grants, which we call “lookbacks.” Through this work, we aim to advance our understanding of the true impact of our funding, transparently share what we learn, and continue improving the cost-effectiveness of donations. Our speakers will answer questions about the methodology behind lookbacks, what we’ve learned, and how those lessons are helping shape our future grantmaking. Register here.

Grant Spotlight

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

Where: Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo
What: Distribution of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) to prevent malaria
Who: Against Malaria Foundation
Amount: $9.6 million
How it works: This grant will cover all distribution costs—including shipping, warehousing, distributor training, and household delivery—for a mass distribution campaign of 4.4 million ITNs in a province with an exceptionally high malaria mortality rate. The nets were procured through a separate $96 million GiveWell grant made in December 2024.
Why this grant: By funding distribution of the nets, we estimate this campaign will provide nets to approximately 819,000 children under five who would otherwise be unprotected, averting an estimated 5,700 additional deaths. While the distribution and procurement grants work together to support the full campaign, we attribute 2,600 of the lives saved to this distribution grant.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund and Top Charities Fund

Hiring Announcements

Featured Role: Senior Recruiters
We’re hiring Senior Recruiters to strengthen our sourcing and selection processes, improve our hiring infrastructure, and partner with leadership to build out high-performing teams.

We’re looking for people who bring the right mix of proactivity and thoughtfulness to recruiting. Hiring at GiveWell requires deep curiosity, sound judgment, and high standards. We’re hiring two Senior Recruiters for Research and one Senior Recruiter for Operations and Outreach.

By helping us hire exceptional talent, you’ll play an important role in continuing to grow GiveWell’s impact. If you’ve been looking for a high-leverage role that uses your strategic thinking, creativity, and passion for GiveWell’s work, we hope you’ll apply!

Partner Roundup

• See how Malaria Consortium’s 2025–2028 strategy is progressing as they prepare for World Malaria Day on Saturday, April 25.
• Celebrate Helen Keller Intl reaching more than 47 million children with vitamin A in 2025 to protect their vision and immune systems.
• See how GiveDirectly is testing ways to increase their cash transfer program’s cost-effectiveness through three GiveWell-funded pilots.

Comments or Questions?

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

The post April 2026 Update appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.

While most donations to GiveWell are directed to programs that reduce child mortality, our growing research capacity over the last several years has expanded what we’re able to evaluate and fund. One outcome of that work is that we’re better able to direct donations to highly cost-effective programs addressing disabling conditions, like clubfoot, and meaningfully improve quality of life.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Meika Ball about GiveWell’s grant to MiracleFeet, an organization that expands access to clubfoot treatment. Their conversation walks through MiracleFeet’s program, how we estimated its cost-effectiveness, and Meika’s recent site visit to see the program in action in Côte d’Ivoire.

Elie and Meika discuss:

• How MiracleFeet supports clubfoot treatment: Clubfoot is treated using the Ponseti method, which involves casts to correct the foot’s position, a small surgical procedure, and a period of bracing. MiracleFeet supports this treatment by partnering with local health facilities, training healthcare workers, educating local communities about clubfoot, providing treatment materials, and working with Ministries of Health. Because of this support, treatment is provided at no cost to patients or their caregivers. GiveWell-funded independent surveys in Côte d’Ivoire and Chad indicated that very few children with clubfoot were being treated before the program, and hundreds have been enrolled since the program’s launch.
• What we learned from a recent site visit: Two GiveWell staff members recently traveled to Côte d’Ivoire to visit health facilities and see children being treated through MiracleFeet’s program. We spoke with a range of stakeholders, including healthcare workers, implementing partners, representatives from the Ministry of Health, caregivers of children receiving treatment, and disability advocates. Seeing the program in action increased our confidence that it is leading more children with clubfoot to receive treatment and is having an important impact on their lives. We also saw early signs of the program being integrated into national health systems, such as clubfoot being added to a maternal child health booklet that parents and midwives review after a child is born.
• What makes this grant different: Most of GiveWell’s grantmaking focuses on preventing child deaths from widespread conditions like malaria or diarrhea. Clubfoot is a relatively rare condition that causes disability, not death. The treatment costs more per child than many other programs we fund, such as distributing vitamin A supplements or malaria nets, and requires sustained caregiver adherence over several years. To assess this grant opportunity, GiveWell applied moral weights, or subjective valuations, for the impact of clubfoot so it could be compared with other programs’ outcomes. We also made a separate grant to support monitoring and evaluation of the program to assess how much MiracleFeet’s support increases the number of children receiving appropriate and effective treatment.

Our ability to evaluate, fund, and monitor a program like MiracleFeet’s is possible because of years of investment in our research team. This program exemplifies how our growing capacity is enabling us to expand our search for cost-effective opportunities where donors can do exceptional 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 March 30, 2026 and represents our best understanding at that time.

The post Podcast Episode 28: Evaluating and Funding a New Kind of Grant (Clubfoot Treatment) appeared first on The GiveWell Blog.