Our three Giving Funds—all of which focus on maximizing the impact of your gift—were designed for donors with different preferences, and we encourage you to donate to the one that makes the most sense for you:

• If you trust GiveWell to decide where and when to allocate your donation, we recommend you donate to our Unrestricted Fund, which can be spent on any GiveWell priority, including both grantmaking and our own operating expenses. We often use unrestricted funding for our operating expenses, but when we have more than we need, we allocate the rest to grantmaking.
• If you trust GiveWell’s research and want to limit your donation to grantmaking, we recommend you donate to the All Grants Fund, which makes rolling grants to the highest-impact opportunities we can identify in global health and well-being, including some with high expected value that carry a higher risk of not achieving their potential impact.
• If you want your donation to be allocated quickly to the programs we’re most confident about, we recommend you donate to the Top Charities Fund. We expect to commit donations to this fund, which are used for the highest-priority funding needs at our four Top Charities, in the quarter after they are received.

We think donors can do a huge amount of good by supporting these funds. The rest of this post describes some of the work that donations to these funds have enabled over the past year.

Seeking the truth and strengthening our work

We care deeply about seeking the truth. Our research team spends more than 50,000 hours each year investigating global health and development programs, exploring how the programs work and how much they help the people they serve.

We know we don’t have all the answers, and we’re continually working to improve our analyses so that we can improve our grantmaking decisions. Sometimes we do this by allocating our own research team’s capacity to this effort, and sometimes we do this by making grants to others.¹And we’re also open to trying other strategies, like the Change Our Mind contest.

Unrestricted Fund: Pressure-testing the research supporting our Top Charity recommendations

Our four Top Charity recommendations are based on thousands of hours of research over many years. Last year, we took a step back to re-evaluate our past work. We engaged in a concerted review of the research supporting each of those recommendations to see what we might have overlooked and where we might be wrong. These efforts were funded by GiveWell’s operating budget, supported by donations to our Unrestricted Fund.

For each program, a team of GiveWell researchers who hadn’t worked on the original investigation spent about 300 person-hours diving into the case for each program. We then asked external experts to review our work, meet with our researchers, and write up their findings.

Overall, we didn’t find any errors that significantly undermined our assessment that the Top Charities are among the most impactful opportunities donors can support. However, in the course of this work, we found (and fixed!) several mistakes in our work,²We’ve already written about these mistakes on our mistakes page. and we also identified ten issues that we plan to prioritize as we conduct future grant investigations.³For a full analysis of what we learned, see this page.

For example, we have typically assumed that only 5% of the population would obtain insecticide-treated nets to prevent malaria outside of the mass distribution campaigns we support. This assumption was based on evidence from studies that are now 30 years old. The deep-dive research turned up newer evidence suggesting that now the percentage might be higher. We plan to continue looking into this question and may adjust our cost-effectiveness model if the newer evidence holds up.

We’re glad to devote time to efforts like these. Our recommendations inform how our donors give and affect the lives of the millions of people served by our Top Charities. It’s important that we check our own work and ask for feedback from people outside GiveWell so that we’re making the best recommendations we can.

Unrestricted Fund: Finding out more about the actions of other funders

In addition to devoting our own research time to checking our work, GiveWell also funds external research. Sometimes that research is aimed at improving our cost-effectiveness models, and sometimes that research is aimed at answering broader questions that inform our strategy.

We recently recommended a grant to Justin Sandefur at the Center for Global Development aimed at answering this question: If the funding gaps that GiveWell has identified at our Top Charities are highly cost-effective, why aren’t they already funded by other groups focused on saving lives? We’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about this question (see, for example, this section of our report on malaria nets), but because the question is so important, we’re making a grant to find out even more. This research is an example of GiveWell’s ongoing efforts to get more information so we can make excellent, highly impactful grantmaking decisions. This grant was supported by donations to the Unrestricted Fund that had been reallocated for grantmaking.

Making grants to save and improve lives

Of course, the vast majority of our grantmaking is focused directly on saving and improving lives. Below are a couple of examples of recent grants we’ve made, one supported by donations to the Top Charities Fund, and one supported by donations to the All Grants Fund.

Top Charities Fund: Increasing the number of children vaccinated in Nigeria

New Incentives offers caregivers conditional cash transfers to incentivize them to immunize their babies. Caregivers are offered a total of about $7 over the course of six clinic visits to encourage them to bring their child into government clinics to receive free vaccinations. New Incentives also does outreach to caregivers about the importance of vaccinating children, monitors clinics to ensure that vaccines are in stock and not expired, and works with its government partners to improve vaccine supply by identifying and addressing bottlenecks in the vaccine supply chain.

The program, which has been expanding quickly and enrolled over one million infants in 2023, currently reaches more than one in ten infants born in Nigeria. We recently recommended a grant to support New Incentives as they expand to parts of two additional states in Nigeria, resulting in the program reaching children in a total of 11 states. Before expanding into a new area, New Incentives conducts surveys to determine how many children are already receiving vaccinations; that way it can focus its work in the places where it is most cost-effective. We think this grant will increase the number of children receiving routine vaccinations, averting a child’s death for around $5,500.

All Grants Fund: Preventing death from tuberculosis in India

Tuberculosis (TB) is a leading cause of disability and death in low- and middle-income countries, killing over a million people each year, more than 100,000 of whom are children. For years, we’ve looked for cost-effective strategies to combat it.

We are excited to have recently funded a program developed through our partnership with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) Incubator that addresses some of the implementation challenges we have seen in the past. The Incubator is part of our long-term strategy: we sometimes find programs that seem potentially highly impactful based on academic research, but for which there is no obvious organizational partner that could implement them at scale. We funded CHAI in order to fill this identified gap, and have had success building a similar type of partnership with Evidence Action via the Evidence Action Accelerator.

In CHAI’s household contact management program, which will be implemented in two states in India, health workers will visit households where someone has already been diagnosed with TB, screen household members for TB, and offer caregivers the opportunity to put their young children who screen negative for TB on preventive treatment (children showing signs of TB will be referred to clinics for treatment).

By visiting households where someone has already been diagnosed with TB, the program will target the children most at risk of contracting the disease. In addition, the program uses a new preventive treatment regimen that is much less burdensome than programs in the past. Rather than needing to take medicine every day for six months or more, children take medication once a week for only 12 weeks. We believe this will make it more likely that children will complete the full course of medication.

We expect the $15.1 million grant to avert more than 1,700 deaths. In addition, we think the program will provide additional benefits: as part of the grant, CHAI will commission an independent evaluation, which we expect to reduce some of our uncertainties about the program, and will engage in market-shaping efforts, with the aim of reducing the price and increasing demand for pediatric TB drugs. The grant was funded in part by donations to the All Grants Fund.

More donations mean more impact

Raising more money is our top organizational priority, and the single most important lever to unlocking more impact over time.⁴For more on our approach to grantmaking timelines, see this post. More donations to our funds means that we are able to make more highly cost-effective grants that save and improve lives. We’re deeply grateful for your past support, and we encourage you to donate to the Giving Fund that matches your giving preferences.