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!

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TB Prevention Program Announced

This week, GiveWell and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) announced a program to prevent tuberculosis (TB) among young children in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, India. This community-based household contact management program is being funded by a five-year, $15.1 million grant recommended by GiveWell. It was launched through the Maximum Impact Incubator—a partnership between GiveWell and CHAI to scope and scale cost-effective interventions—and was announced at the Clinton Global Initiative 2024 Annual Meeting in New York City earlier this week.

India has the highest TB burden in the world, and the program focuses on districts in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with the highest TB incidence. Health workers will visit the households of people diagnosed with TB, screen household members for possible TB, and offer caregivers preventative treatment for young children who screen negative, as young children are at much higher risk of dying from TB once infected than adults. Anyone that screens positive will be referred to a health facility for diagnosis and treatment.

We’re excited about this grant for a number of reasons:

• By using a less-burdensome TB prevention regimen and leveraging existing community health worker infrastructure to provide screening directly at the households, the program will likely increase the number of children receiving treatment.
• This grant will help us better understand the program’s effectiveness—CHAI will commission IDinsight to evaluate the program through a large-scale cluster-randomized controlled trial that will compare CHAI’s community-based program to the largely facility-based standard of care.
• This grant will support CHAI in market-shaping activities, such as working with drug manufacturers to further lower the price of the preventative drugs and making it easier to procure the right quantities. Market shaping is an area we are proactively investigating, and we look forward to learning more.

We estimate that the program will directly avert about 2,900 cases of TB disease and 975 deaths among children under five over the course of the grant period. You can read more in the Commitment to Action, and keep an eye out for GiveWell’s forthcoming grant page with more info.

August Quiz Question + Answer

Last month’s quiz question: Approximately how many donors supported GiveWell in 2023?

The answer: Approximately 32,170 donors¹This is our best estimate, but we aren’t able to precisely count the number of anonymous donors. gave to support the cost-effective programs we recommend or to support GiveWell’s operations.

Out of the 95 responses we received—with answers ranging from 333 to 20,000,000—the closest guess was 32,726! Congratulations to our winner, Susan Guthrie Dunn, who will receive a GiveWell hat as a prize!

Sign up for our newsletter and answer our monthly quiz question for your chance to win!

Research and Partner Roundup

GiveWell publishes a glossary of key terms and more. Malaria Consortium publishes a new photo blog post sharing a pioneering study into how seasonal malaria chemoprevention impacts children’s immune responses to malaria. The Behavioral Insights Team publishes a press release announcing the “Be In A Net” program in partnership with Malaria Consortium.