Water quality is a significant area of grantmaking for GiveWell. Since 2022, we’ve directed around $120 million to water quality interventions, including a $65 million grant in 2022 to support Evidence Action’s chlorine dispenser program in Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi, and a $39 million grant in 2023 to support Evidence Action’s work assisting the scale up of in-line chlorination in two states in India.

We think that chlorination programs like these are likely to be highly cost-effective because chlorine is cheap, and based on our research, we think it can have a substantial impact in reducing child mortality.

In June, we wrote about our current plans for our water grantmaking portfolio. As we mentioned then, one of our highest-priority goals is to expand the number of implementers of large-scale chlorination programs. This is because our current grantmaking relies heavily on Evidence Action, which does not operate in some of the places where we think chlorination could look most cost-effective, such as parts of Francophone Africa.

Towards this goal, we are launching a public request for information (RFI) to identify organizations who would be interested in implementing chlorination programs in our highest-priority countries.

As a first step, we are looking to fund small-scale pilots that will allow organizations to demonstrate the operational feasibility of a chlorination program. If these pilots are successful, we would then consider larger, follow-on grants to scale these pilots. While this is some way off yet, we think it’s possible that a program started through this RFI could become a future GiveWell Top Charity.

We’re making this RFI public to ensure that it is seen by as many organizations as possible. We have designed the RFI to accommodate a very broad range of potential implementers, including (but not limited to):

• Traditional non-profit organizations (whether or not they currently operate water quality programs)
• For-profit water utilities looking to add water treatment to their current services
• Large multilaterals interested in layering chlorination onto existing infrastructure projects
• Smaller organizations who are able to demonstrate significant capacity to scale in the near future

We are mostly interested in funding pilots of the chlorination interventions that we have already funded at scale (in-line chlorination and chlorine dispensers), but we’d consider other approaches to chlorinate drinking water. (For more information about these interventions, see here.)

For full details about the RFI, see here. The deadline for organizations to respond is March 7, 2025.

Launching a public RFI like this is new for GiveWell, and we’re not sure whether it will be successful. However, we think there is value in experimenting with new ways to identify highly cost-effective grant opportunities, and even if we do not receive many expressions of interest, we think we will learn something important about the potential scale of our water chlorination grantmaking in the near term.

We’re excited to review the expressions of interest we receive, and—hopefully—to recommend funding for pilot programs later in the year.

How you can help

If you are involved in the water sector, or know organizations who might be a good fit for this RFI, we’d appreciate you sharing this with your network and encouraging them to apply. Interested organizations can email waterRFI@givewell.org with any further questions.