The GiveWell Blog

Podcast Episode 8: Malaria Funding at a Crossroads

| by GiveWell Staff

Malaria is the cause area where GiveWell has directed the most funding over our 18-year history. We’ve recommended over $1 billion to malaria programs, which we estimate will avert over 200,000 deaths, mostly in young children, through support for programs like Against Malaria Foundation’s insecticide-treated nets and Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention.

Despite significant progress against malaria in the past 25 years (reducing annual deaths from 900,000 to 600,000), malaria is still a leading cause of death globally for children under five. The current status of malaria prevention—and all the progress that’s been made—is now in a precarious position. Significant reductions in funding from key donors like the US President’s Malaria Initiative and the Global Fund are anticipated and threaten to create substantial new gaps in life-saving malaria programs.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Alex Bowles and Senior Researcher Rosie Bettle about the impacts these funding cuts could have. They offer a timely look at the uncertainty of the funding landscape, the life-saving malaria programs that are most at risk, and how GiveWell is leveraging its expertise to respond to emerging needs.

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Apples, Oranges, and Outcomes

| by GiveWell Staff

Imagine you are planning to make a charitable donation and want your gift to make a real difference. You’ve done your research and found three very effective programs: one provides cash transfers to increase the incomes of very poor households; one provides treatment to correct clubfoot, a congenital condition that causes pain and mobility loss; and one provides children with medication to prevent illness and death from malaria. How do you decide?

Like GiveWell, you may aim to maximize the amount of “good” your donation does. But how can you compare giving opportunities when the good that programs do often looks very different?

Let’s go back to the three options you found. We very roughly estimate that a $10,000 donation might do one of the following:

  • Double the consumption of around 15 very poor people for one year
  • Correct clubfoot for eight children
  • Prevent the death of two children from malaria

Estimating the impact of your donation in this way doesn’t resolve the dilemma of where to give—it just raises other important questions. Which of those outcomes has the greatest impact? Is preventing a child’s death more or less valuable than doubling a household’s income? How much more or less valuable? In order to make a decision about where to donate, you’ll need a way to compare very different outcomes.

GiveWell faces the same set of questions. Because our funding is limited, we have to make choices about which programs to support, but those programs don’t all have the same outcomes. We need a way to compare programs to each other.

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Podcast Episode 7: Deepening GiveWell’s Focus on Livelihoods Programs

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question?

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about why GiveWell is dedicating more capacity to researching livelihoods programs that aim to increase people’s incomes. They discuss how we’re building on existing work, searching for new cost-effective opportunities, and exploring more of the impactful programs we’ve long cared about.

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What We’ve Learned from Our First Lookbacks

(updated on: ) | by Alex Cohen

Bar chart showing the change in expected deaths averted. For New Incentives, the estimate increased from 17,000 to 27,000. For Helen Keller Intl, the estimate decreased from 2,000 to 450.

At GiveWell, we’re committed to understanding the impact of our grantmaking and improving our decisions over time. That’s why we’ve begun conducting “lookbacks”—reviews of past grants, typically two to three years after making them, that assess how well they’ve met our initial expectations and what we can learn from them.

We conduct lookbacks for two main reasons: accountability and learning. By examining both the successes and challenges of past grants and publishing those findings on our website, we aim to be transparent about the impact of donor funding. Systematically reviewing past grants also helps us identify ways to improve our decision-making. When lookbacks identify challenges, lower-than-expected impact, or key questions that we think we should have an answer to, we use these findings to adjust our approach to similar grants in the future or prioritize follow-up research. When lookbacks show higher-than-expected impact, that’s valuable, too—in those cases, we made the error of underestimating impact and might be granting too little to certain programs.

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June 2025 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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Podcast Episode 6: Forecasting the Future of Global Health Funding

| by GiveWell Staff

In the face of potential major cuts to foreign aid, how can we anticipate the impact on global health and effectively direct resources to the areas of greatest need?

In this episode, GiveWell’s CEO and co-founder, Elie Hassenfeld, speaks with Principal Researcher Alex Cohen to discuss the forecasting work GiveWell has undertaken to better understand what the future of global health funding might look like. They explore the potential size of the funding gaps, which programs might be affected, and how GiveWell is preparing to respond in a new era for global health philanthropy.

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