When GiveWell investigates a new cause area, we’re often focused on two priorities: directing funding where we think it can help people most and generating evidence to inform larger investments later. Family planning is a clear example. Recent foreign aid cuts—including reductions from the US, UK, and Dutch governments—deepened an already substantial need and opened up new cost-effective funding opportunities.

When we published our last podcast episode on family planning, GiveWell had made only a couple of small grants. Since then, we’ve made a number of additional grants totaling around $20 million, exemplifying how our growing research capacity and expertise enable us to expand into new areas. By doing so, we aim to move more donor funding faster to global health programs where it can do extraordinary good.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera about the family planning programming we’ve funded over the past year, how we’ve structured our grant portfolio, and what we’re hoping to learn.

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Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death for children under five, killing more than 400,000 children every year. GiveWell has funded several programs to prevent and treat diarrhea, and we recently expanded our work by making a grant to support the implementation and evaluation of WASHmobile in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. The program, which was developed by Johns Hopkins University, delivers water treatment supplies and hygiene messaging to households at the highest risk of diarrheal disease. It has shown promising results in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) but hasn’t yet been implemented at scale in the challenging settings where the need is greatest.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett, who leads GiveWell’s water research subteam, about the grant. They discuss how the program works, what prior research tells us about its potential, the significant uncertainties involved, and what GiveWell expects to learn.

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GiveWell tends to be known for its work in areas like malaria prevention, water treatment, and nutrition. But as our research team has grown, so has our ability to search for cost-effective programs across a much wider range of issues.

Serious health problems, such as lack of medical oxygen and stockouts of essential medicines at health facilities, affect millions of people in low-income countries. There may be highly cost-effective solutions to these problems that haven’t been thoroughly evaluated or adequately funded. One of the ways GiveWell is searching for these solutions is through the new areas research subteam, which is responsible for investigating programs in cause areas GiveWell hasn’t historically focused on.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dan Brown about GiveWell’s new areas research subteam and three grants that illustrate the team’s work.

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