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.
GiveWell’s latest webinar took a close look at a critical step in our research process: how we’re working to evaluate past grants to understand what happened, why, and how we can use what we learn to improve our grantmaking over time.
Our research spans the full lifecycle of grants. Before we approve funding for a grant, our research team reviews academic evidence, builds cost-effectiveness models, and consults with experts to estimate the program’s expected impact. When programs near the end of their funding, we investigate whether a grant achieved the impact we initially projected. In 2025, our growing research capacity enabled us to expand this final step for select grants and publish comprehensive evaluations that we call “lookbacks.”
During the webinar, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld moderated a discussion with Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller and Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury. They covered four examples of grant lookbacks—discussing what we’ve learned and how these lessons are informing our work—and answered questions from the audience live.
In September 2025, we created a livelihoods research subteam to specifically focus on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. While we have evaluated and funded livelihoods programs throughout GiveWell’s history, we now have a dedicated program officer overseeing this portfolio, which has allowed us to build on and deepen that work.
Historically, GiveWell has predominantly focused on health-related programs. Diseases like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia can be prevented fairly cheaply, and the evidence for health programs is often strong relative to other areas. As our research team has grown, we’ve been building capacity to explore programs that increase people’s incomes, where the long-term impact is often more challenging to measure and effectiveness differs from context to context.
In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury about GiveWell’s expanding work on livelihoods programs, which programs might be the most cost-effective, and research we’re funding to help answer some key questions.
Despite significant progress fighting malaria over the past few decades, the disease still kills around 600,000 people annually. Malaria is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide.
While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team are allowing us to take on this challenge now in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago.
Over our nineteen-year history, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion in donations to malaria prevention programs that we estimate will save more than 235,000 lives. This is primarily through two core programs:
GiveWell’s overall research team has doubled in size over the past few years. Our malaria research team is the largest of our research teams, with 15 people collectively devoting more than 20,000 hours each year to our expanded efforts.
With this growth, we are working to reduce malaria deaths even further by (1) funding evidence to improve our future grantmaking decisions for core malaria prevention programs, (2) identifying ways to increase coverage of our core programs, and (3) expanding our portfolio beyond our core programs.
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.
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.
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.