The GiveWell Blog

Bringing Routine Vaccines Closer to Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

| by GiveWell Staff

Routine childhood immunizations, provided on a set schedule over a child’s first two years of life, are very effective at reducing some of the major causes of death in young children. We estimate that in the provinces where we’ve supported programs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), about one in 13 unvaccinated children dies from vaccine-preventable diseases before the age of five, yet only about half of children there receive the vaccinations they need.

Much of our Vaccination research subteam’s work focuses on finding ways to make it easier for caregivers to have their children vaccinated, such as bringing vaccines closer to where parents and infants live. This is especially important in places like DRC, where coverage is low and disease burden is high. Following a request for proposals and a request for information seeking targeted vaccination outreach programs, we funded 11 additional programs, run by distinct organizations—six of which will be implemented in DRC. This portfolio builds on years of investment in our research team, which allowed us to evaluate more than 100 proposals and fund several programs side by side to learn which approaches work best.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Natalie Crispin, who leads GiveWell’s vaccination grantmaking, about the programs we funded in DRC. They discuss barriers preventing many children in DRC from getting vaccinated, how the programs we’re funding aim to reach them, and what we hope to learn.

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October 2026 Updates

| 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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Further Scaling Our Malaria Grantmaking

(updated on: ) | by Julie Faller

Over the past five years, GiveWell has expanded the scale of our grantmaking and team substantially. We expect to grant more than $1 billion this year, more than double the $418 million we committed in 2025. Alongside this grantmaking growth, we’ve more than doubled the number of researchers on our team since the start of last year. A larger team means we can investigate a greater number of both more complex and larger funding opportunities than we could before. One area where we expect our grantmaking to increase substantially in the coming years is the prevention and treatment of malaria.

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

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

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Behind the Research: How Our Team Tackles Hard Questions

| by GiveWell Staff

In an effort to direct substantially more funding to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find to help people, GiveWell’s research is expanding in two directions at once: going broader, to cover more areas of global health and development, and going deeper, to improve the inputs that inform our decision-making.

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

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

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September 2026 Updates

| 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.

Read more

Pressure-Testing Our Research as GiveWell Grows

| by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell works to continually improve our research so we can make better grant decisions and direct donations where we believe they can do the most good. GiveWell’s Cross-Cutting research subteam is an important part of that effort—it investigates the impact of the programs we fund, works to resolve our largest uncertainties, and aims to improve our research. As GiveWell’s grantmaking grows, the Cross-Cutting subteam is strengthening our data collection and analysis to support that growth.

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

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