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.
Our Beyond the Spreadsheets podcast mini-series lets you ride along with our leadership team on their recent weeklong site visit to Malawi. Recorded daily during the trip, the series shares the behind-the-scenes experience of a GiveWell site visit through real-time reflections and clips of conversations.
At GiveWell, the vast majority of our work is desk-based research—analyzing evidence and modeling program outcomes. Site visits are a small part of what we do, but they add crucial on-the-ground context that raises important questions, challenges our assumptions, and makes our research stronger.
We had two main goals in visiting Malawi. First, we wanted to understand the effects of foreign aid cuts firsthand in a country that may be particularly hard hit. Second, we wanted to see livelihoods programs like GiveDirectly and Spark Microgrants in action, providing insight as we expand our focus on interventions that aim to increase people’s economic well-being.
Throughout the week, the team visited health clinics, schools, and local villages to speak with healthcare workers and community members who shared a glimpse into their lives. Listen to the episodes below to hear a candid, day-by-day account of our learning process and some of the new insights and questions that will inform our future research.
Clean water. Most of us take it for granted. We can turn on the tap and have safe water to drink whenever we want, without having to give it a second thought. That’s not the case for more than a billion people around the world who lack access to uncontaminated drinking water. This is a significant health concern: According to the World Health Organization, more than 500,000 people die each year from diseases caused by contaminated water.
We’ve been thinking hard about how best to build on our past grantmaking to address the huge need for clean water. In January, we launched a public request for information (RFI) to identify organizations who would be interested in implementing chlorination programs in countries with a high burden of waterborne disease.
RFIs are a relatively new strategy for GiveWell aimed at identifying highly cost-effective grantmaking opportunities. The call for water chlorination programs was just the second RFI we issued. The first, completed in 2024, was for research grants, and we’ve since completed another, for programs aimed at increasing vaccination rates. We’ve been excited about the overwhelming interest our RFIs have received. By the March 7 application deadline for water chlorination programs, we had received more than 200 applications. From that group, we recently funded a portfolio of grants totaling around $16 million to support pilots of in-line chlorination programs in six African countries.
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.
As you may have heard on a recent episode of our podcast, we’re launching an experiment: focusing more attention on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. We are in the process of completing a search for a new program officer to lead an expanded livelihoods research team, and we plan to allocate up to $10 million for granting to cost-effective programs we find in the first year. Depending on the outcome of these efforts, we may hire additional researchers to focus on livelihoods.
GiveWell has historically directed most of its funding toward health interventions that avert death and disease, but those are not the only positive outcomes our grants target. We have long grappled with questions about how to value different positive impacts relative to each other. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially increase someone’s economic well-being? Our expanded research into programs that improve lives will help us better reflect the diversity of relevant perspectives on that question in our grantmaking.
Our standard moral weights—that is, the values we assign to different outcomes—assume that saving a life is about 100 times more valuable (depending on age) than doubling a person’s income for a year (see our recent blog post on moral weights to learn more). This assumption has meant income-focused programs have been less likely than health-focused programs to meet our cost-effectiveness threshold.
But our moral weights are a necessary tool, not an absolute truth. Some GiveWell donors and staff, as well as some of the people affected by the programs we fund, place a higher value on income-increasing programs. To account for this, we’ll be funding livelihoods programs that would appear as cost-effective as our standard recommendations to a donor who values income gains twice as much as our standard moral weights.
Foreign aid funding cuts are reshaping the global health landscape, creating urgent funding gaps and forcing difficult prioritization decisions across health systems worldwide. To understand the real-world effects, it’s essential to hear from the organizations working on the front lines with government partners to navigate the funding crisis. The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) is a large global health nonprofit and an important GiveWell partner in this work.
In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with CHAI CEO Buddy Shah about how the aid cuts are affecting health programs and what it takes to build a strategic response. They discuss the hidden complexities of the funding landscape, the difficult choices governments are being forced to make, and what this pivotal moment could mean for the future of global health.