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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Following Up on Our Grant to MiracleFeet

Much of GiveWell’s grantmaking focuses on preventing child deaths. But many serious health challenges in low- and middle-income countries involve disability, not death. Disability treatment is an area we’ve considered for many years, but these interventions are often complex and require specialized research. As our capacity and expertise have grown, we’ve been able to evaluate and fund programs like clubfoot treatment.

Clubfoot is a congenital condition in which children are born with one or both feet twisted inward and downward. It affects roughly one in 800 newborns globally, and in low- and middle-income countries, only about a fifth of children who need treatment receive it. Left untreated, it causes pain and loss of mobility. But when treated early with the Ponseti method—which involves a series of casts, a minor outpatient surgical procedure, and four to five years of bracing—it can be fully corrected. In 2023, we made a grant to MiracleFeet, an organization that partners with local health facilities and ministries of health to expand access to clubfoot treatment in countries where most children go untreated.

Two GiveWell staff recently traveled to Côte d’Ivoire to see the program firsthand. Over four days, they visited clinics, met with the Ministry of Health and implementing partners, and spoke with caregivers of children receiving clubfoot treatment.

“I have always known that the tangible impact of GiveWell’s work is that people are meaningfully helped out in the world; still, I was stunned by the experience of seeing actual, specific children—dozens of them—receiving transformative care.”
—Maggie Lloydhauser, Senior Philanthropy Advisor

In our latest podcast episode, CEO Elie Hassenfeld and Program Officer Meika Ball discuss what made this grant different from most we fund, what we’ve learned two and a half years in, and reflections Meika and Maggie recorded during their site visit.

Scrutinizing One of Our Longest-Funded Programs

Vitamin A supplementation is one of the programs GiveWell has supported the longest, and it has an unusually strong evidence base for reducing child mortality. Yet, as is the case for most global health programs, the evidence raises complex, unresolved questions. Over the last several years, we’ve expanded our capacity to carefully research these questions.

In our recent podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher Stephan Guyenet about the evidence base for vitamin A supplementation and how GiveWell has improved our cost-effectiveness estimates for the program.

Elie and Stephan cover:

• The evidence base for vitamin A supplementation: Rigorous trials show that vitamin A supplementation can significantly reduce child mortality, but most of these trials were conducted 30 to 40 years ago, and a more recent large trial in India found a much smaller effect.
• How GiveWell worked through the complications: To address our questions about the existing evidence, we conducted further research, including an analysis of the specific diseases for which vitamin A supplementation reduces mortality, a novel dosing-frequency analysis with an outside statistician, and an assessment of possible publication bias.
• What this means for grantmaking: While the trials reported a 19% reduction in mortality for children 6 to 59 months old, we estimate the impact in modern settings is smaller: a 1% to 11% lower risk of death. However, treatment costs are very low, and we’ve learned how to target regions where vitamin A supplementation can be particularly cost-effective. We estimate our most recent grant to Helen Keller Intl is 25 times more cost-effective than our benchmark.

Read our episode summary for more, and subscribe to be notified of our newest episodes.

Upcoming Webinar: Looking Back to Give Better

Join us for our upcoming webinar, Looking Back to Give Better: How GiveWell Evaluates Its Grantmaking, on Tuesday, June 9. GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld will moderate a conversation with Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller about how we evaluate whether a grant achieved the impact we initially estimated—and how we use those findings to make better impact estimates over time.

Our growing research capacity has recently enabled us to expand this step in our research process and publish comprehensive evaluations for select grants, which we call “lookbacks.” Through this work, we aim to advance our understanding of the true impact of our funding, transparently share what we learn, and continue improving the cost-effectiveness of donations. Our speakers will answer questions about the methodology behind lookbacks, what we’ve learned, and how those lessons are helping shape our future grantmaking. 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: Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo
What: Distribution of insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) to prevent malaria
Who: Against Malaria Foundation
Amount: $9.6 million
How it works: This grant will cover all distribution costs—including shipping, warehousing, distributor training, and household delivery—for a mass distribution campaign of 4.4 million ITNs in a province with an exceptionally high malaria mortality rate. The nets were procured through a separate $96 million GiveWell grant made in December 2024.
Why this grant: By funding distribution of the nets, we estimate this campaign will provide nets to approximately 819,000 children under five who would otherwise be unprotected, averting an estimated 5,700 additional deaths. While the distribution and procurement grants work together to support the full campaign, we attribute 2,600 of the lives saved to this distribution grant.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund and Top Charities Fund

Hiring Announcements

Featured Role: Senior Recruiters
We’re hiring Senior Recruiters to strengthen our sourcing and selection processes, improve our hiring infrastructure, and partner with leadership to build out high-performing teams.

We’re looking for people who bring the right mix of proactivity and thoughtfulness to recruiting. Hiring at GiveWell requires deep curiosity, sound judgment, and high standards. We’re hiring two Senior Recruiters for Research and one Senior Recruiter for Operations and Outreach.

By helping us hire exceptional talent, you’ll play an important role in continuing to grow GiveWell’s impact. If you’ve been looking for a high-leverage role that uses your strategic thinking, creativity, and passion for GiveWell’s work, we hope you’ll apply!

Partner Roundup

• See how Malaria Consortium’s 2025–2028 strategy is progressing as they prepare for World Malaria Day on Saturday, April 25.
• Celebrate Helen Keller Intl reaching more than 47 million children with vitamin A in 2025 to protect their vision and immune systems.
• See how GiveDirectly is testing ways to increase their cash transfer program’s cost-effectiveness through three GiveWell-funded pilots.

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.