Each year we reflect on the opportunities our research has identified and how we think donors can have the greatest impact. For the past three years, we’ve encouraged donors to choose among our three Giving Funds based on their preferences: the Top Charities Fund for those who wanted the most certainty, the All Grants Fund for those who wanted to support the highest-impact opportunities we have identified, and the Unrestricted Fund for those those who wanted to support GiveWell’s operations as well as the full spectrum of our grantmaking.
This year, we recommend that donors give to the All Grants Fund.
GiveWell is growing quickly. We expect our grantmaking in 2026 to exceed $1 billion, more than double what we committed in 2025, and we expect to grow further in the years ahead. From 2027 through 2032, we’re aiming to grant at least $2.5 billion in new malaria funding, and potentially much more. In addition, in 2027 alone, we expect to grant more than $1 billion to program areas outside malaria, and we think we could grant more with additional funding. At this scale, flexibility matters more than it used to.
Supporting the All Grants Fund provides us with this flexibility. Donations to the All Grants Fund can be used to support the full range of GiveWell’s grantmaking. We make grants from the All Grants Fund to those opportunities that we believe will have the greatest impact—that may mean, for example, supporting a Top Charity program, piloting new programs, or funding research that we think will help us direct more funding to highly cost-effective programs in the future.
The Top Charities Fund, in contrast, can only be granted to four programs. We continue to think highly of those programs and believe they can use more funding.1As donations grow, giving to the Top Charities Fund may outpace what the Top Charity programs can absorb at our current cost-effectiveness threshold. If that happens, donations to the fund would wait until new opportunities at those programs open up. We recently removed the time requirement for committing funds from the Top Charities Fund to ensure that all donations to the fund would be used for programs meeting our cost-effectiveness threshold. For example, our largest grant to date went to one of our Top Charity programs: in August we made a $276 million grant to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) for insecticide-treated nets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This year so far, we’ve made 40 grants using donations to the All Grants Fund. These grants have supported Top Charity programs such as AMF’s nets and Helen Keller’s vitamin A supplementation, along with HIV prevention and services, vaccination outreach, scoping for water disinfection programs, coverage surveys, and research on new tools to prevent malaria, among many others.2You can see the full range of grants supported by the All Grants Fund in the GiveWell grants database.
While we are often less certain about the individual grants we make via our All Grants Fund, since they include more experimental opportunities and programs that have a less robust evidence base, we think that—in aggregate—these grants represent the highest-impact use of donations. We want to put every dollar to use where we expect it will do the most good, and the All Grants Fund enables us to do that.
If you’d like to support our ability to continue doing what we do, we also welcome donations to our Unrestricted Fund, which can be used for any GiveWell priority, including our operating expenses. If we raise more unrestricted funding than we need for our operating costs, we will grant the excess to highly cost-effective programs that our research has identified. This is a great fit for donors who are excited about GiveWell’s work and trust us to prioritize between our operations and grantmaking.
Thank you for your trust in our research and your partnership in helping people as much as we can.
Notes
| ↑1 | As donations grow, giving to the Top Charities Fund may outpace what the Top Charity programs can absorb at our current cost-effectiveness threshold. If that happens, donations to the fund would wait until new opportunities at those programs open up. We recently removed the time requirement for committing funds from the Top Charities Fund to ensure that all donations to the fund would be used for programs meeting our cost-effectiveness threshold. |
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| ↑2 | You can see the full range of grants supported by the All Grants Fund in the GiveWell grants database. |

