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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Announcing Our Largest Grant to Date

GiveWell recently made our largest grant to date: $276 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) for insecticide-treated net campaigns in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It will support the purchase and distribution of around 92 million nets for campaigns across all 26 provinces from 2027 through 2029, 46 million of which we think would not have been distributed otherwise. We estimate the grant will avert approximately 67,000 deaths.

A grant of this size called for research we couldn’t have taken on a few years ago. Our new blog post with interactive data visualizations walks through some of that research and allows you to explore our analysis. We’ve spent years building a team that can do this kind of work, and it’s showing up in how much funding we can move—we anticipate our grantmaking will approach or potentially exceed $1 billion this year.

In this grant investigation, our increased capacity enabled our research team to dig deeper than we’ve been able to in the past and build the confidence needed to make this grant. In the blog, you can read about how they tested whether past campaigns we funded had actually reduced child deaths, drew on several sources of data to sharpen our estimate of DRC’s malaria burden, and examined how quickly nets wear out there.

In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Alex Bowles, who led the investigation. They discuss the questions the team set out to answer during the grant investigation, and what changes when GiveWell funds a program at this scale.

Share Your Feedback on Our Newsletter

We want to hear what you think of our monthly newsletter. Click your response below to open a short survey with five more questions.

Question 1: Thinking about the last few newsletters, how much do you usually read?

• I read all the way through
• I skim the whole thing
• I read only the sections that interest me
• I read the first section or two, then stop
• I open it but don’t read it

Finding the Bottlenecks in Family Planning Access

In our recent podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera about the roughly $20 million in family planning programming we’ve funded over the past year, how we’ve structured our grant portfolio, and what we’re hoping to learn.

Elie and Dilhan discuss:

• Funding across the family planning system: Providing people with family planning resources requires a three-tiered system—purchasing contraceptives, moving them through the supply chain to health facilities, and delivering services to clients. We’ve made grants at all three levels to learn where additional funding could do the most good.
• Reaching people with limited access: We made two grants aiming to increase access at the local level, each taking a different approach so we can learn more about which strategies are most cost-effective: MSI Reproductive Choices sends small teams of nurses to communities that lack family planning services, and Lafiya trains local health workers to provide family planning services in the communities where they live.
• Building evidence alongside the grants: There are relatively few randomized trials of family planning programs and limited rigorous evidence on the specific programs we’re funding, so we’ve built learning opportunities into all of our family planning grants to help inform our future grantmaking.

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

Grant Spotlight

Our grantmaking aims to support programs and research that save and improve lives the most per dollar. Here’s a look at one recent example:

Where: Six regions in Mali—Bamako, Gao, Kidal, Ménaka, Taoudénit, and Tombouctou
What: Vitamin A supplementation (VAS) to reduce young children’s risk of death from common illnesses
Who: Helen Keller Intl
Total: Approximately $882,000
How it works: Vitamin A deficiency weakens children’s immune systems and increases the risk of death from illnesses like diarrhea and measles. Helen Keller Intl’s VAS program provides financial and technical support to government-run VAS programs that deliver supplements twice per year to children between 6 and 59 months old. This grant funds two rounds of VAS campaigns across six regions of Mali in 2026.
Why this grant: Without this grant, these regions would likely not receive VAS this year. Helen Keller Intl already supports VAS campaigns elsewhere in Mali and has experience working in these areas, so we believe it is well positioned to expand its VAS program to cover this gap.
Funded by: Donations to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund

Hiring Announcements

Featured Role: Head of Legal
We’re hiring a Head of Legal to lead GiveWell’s legal function and build a team that can scale with our expected growth.

This role will own GiveWell’s legal portfolio and strategy, manage risk and compliance across multiple jurisdictions, and oversee our grants administration function. This is a founding leadership role that will design the systems, processes, and team structure we need as the organization grows.

If you’re an experienced attorney who is excited to build a legal function from the ground up, we’d love to hear from you.

We have several other newly opened positions—if you know someone who might be a good fit, please share the relevant link and encourage them to apply.

• (New!) Cause Prioritization Lead (apply by Sept 30)
• Operations Roles (apply by Sept 7)
• Senior Program Officers
• Program Officers
• Senior Researchers (subteam-specific roles available)
• Senior Accountant
• Staff Accountant

Visit our Jobs page to see all open positions.

Partner Roundup

• Follow a New Incentives data collector through a day of household surveys measuring vaccination coverage in northern Nigeria.
• See AMF’s announcement of our $276 million milestone grant to prevent malaria in DRC.
• Read Malaria Consortium’s update on Burkina Faso, where total malaria deaths fell 44% in a year, thanks in part to seasonal malaria chemoprevention.

Comments or Questions?

We’re always looking for fresh perspectives on our research. If you have comments or questions about our work, we want to hear from you! Reach out to us at info@givewell.org.