The GiveWell Blog

Building our Safe Water Grantmaking: Apply to the DIV Fund’s RFP

| by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell has granted $5 million to the DIV Fund to identify and support promising water quality and access innovations. Our grant aims to build a pipeline of high-potential, cost-effective opportunities that GiveWell could consider for future funding. If you’re working on piloting or testing an early-stage water intervention, or know someone who is, please apply to the DIV Fund’s newly launched request for proposals (RFP) or share it with your network. Applications are now open and are being accepted on a rolling basis.

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. 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 and types of grants 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.

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May 2026 Updates

(updated on: ) | by Chandler Brotak

Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!

If you’d like to receive the complete newsletter in your inbox each month, you can subscribe here.

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Podcast Episode 30: What a Decade of Iron Funding Has Taught Us

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

Anemia, which is commonly caused by iron deficiency, can cause fatigue, cognitive impairment, and complications during pregnancy—and it affects roughly a quarter of the world’s population. Over the last decade, GiveWell has directed nearly $50 million to programs to address this health issue.

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.

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How We’re Searching for the Best Ways to Help in 2026

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to rapidly scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the near future. The second is to grant at least $500 million to the best opportunities we can find this year to save and improve lives.

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.

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Podcast Episode 29: Behind the Analysis — Assessing Past Malaria Nets Grants

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

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, we’ve formalized and expanded this work, publishing comprehensive “lookbacks” for select grants.

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.

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GiveWell Opens RFI for Malaria Pilots and Research

| by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell is launching a new request for information (RFI) to expand and strengthen our malaria grantmaking in Africa and help our donors make a greater impact. Expressions of interest can be submitted through one of two tracks, the first for malaria chemoprevention and vector control pilot programs and the second for research and evaluation. Submissions are due June 24.

Malaria kills around 600,000 people annually, mostly children under five in Africa. 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!

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