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.
Our Safe Water Projects
More than 500,000 people die each year from diseases caused by contaminated water. We’ve been funding chlorination programs to address this for years, but we knew there were additional cost-effective opportunities out there—if we could find the right partners to implement them.
Earlier this year, we tried something new. We issued a public request for information asking organizations to propose water chlorination programs in high-burden countries. By the time the application closed, we had received more than 200 submissions.
From those proposals, we built a ~$16 million portfolio of 13 pilot programs across six African countries. We intentionally selected a diverse mix—different implementing partners, chlorination devices, and contexts ranging from refugee camps to rural villages. The goal: learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, about what works where.
*We funded Self-Help Africa’s pilot as part of our May 2025 grant to the University of California, Berkeley to conduct research on in-line chlorination, prior to making the other grants included in this portfolio. Because we think Self-Help Africa’s pilot has a high learning value (it is part of a randomized controlled trial), we did not specifically model the pilot’s cost-effectiveness or make the same adjustments to the estimated number of people reached as we did for other programs.
The map was created using MapChart.
The pilots will have a sizable direct impact. We estimate they’ll provide the equivalent of one year of safe water for 2.8 million people and avert more than 2,000 deaths, most of them children under five. But they’re also designed to answer critical questions about feasibility, device performance, and implementation models that will inform our future grantmaking.
If the successful pilots scale up, we estimate there could be more than $100 million in highly cost-effective funding opportunities in these countries alone—potentially reaching millions more people with clean drinking water.
Read the full post to learn how we selected the grants, what we hope to learn, and why some pilots might fail (and why that’s okay).
Beyond the Spreadsheets: Malawi Site Visit Podcast Series
We’re excited to share the final episode of our Beyond the Spreadsheets podcast mini-series today, which lets you ride along with our leadership team on their recent weeklong site visit to Malawi. Recorded daily during the trip, the series shares the behind-the-scenes experience of a GiveWell site visit through real-time reflections and clips of conversations.
Across five episodes chronicling each day of the trip, tune in to hear how people are using cash transfers to improve their homes and businesses, how foreign aid cuts are affecting local health clinics, and how community microgrants are helping villages start small businesses. You can find all the episodes, along with a photo and short summary of each day on our blog.
Webinar on December 4: Growing Needs, Shrinking Aid
Join us for our upcoming webinar—Growing Needs, Shrinking Aid: Cost-Effective Action in a Year of Funding Cuts—on Thursday, December 4. Moderated by GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld, a panel of GiveWell researchers will answer questions selected live by the audience on the effects of recent aid cuts, how GiveWell is responding, and what we’re learning along the way—including our predictions and uncertainties about the future. Register here.
Grant Spotlight
Our grantmaking supports programs and research that aim to save and improve lives the most per dollar. Here’s a look at one recent example:
Where: Chad
What: Preventative medication for children under five that protects against malaria throughout the peak transmission season
Who: Malaria Consortium
Amount: $10.4 million
How it works: This grant will shield children under five from malaria by expanding seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) coverage to 31 new health districts in Chad and maintaining coverage in 12 previously-funded districts during the high-transmission rainy season.
Why this grant: This grant provides a proven and highly effective malaria prevention tool to children who would otherwise not have access. We estimate this grant will provide treatment to approximately 1 million children who would not receive it otherwise and avert over 3,000 deaths.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund and partner funds
To learn more, check out the grant page.
Comments or Questions?
We’re always looking for fresh perspectives on our research. If you have comments or questions on our work, we want to hear from you! Reach out to us at info@givewell.org.