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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Spotlight on a GiveWell Grantee

This month, we are shining a spotlight on Suvita, an organization that aims to increase childhood vaccination rates in India. In April 2023, we made a $3.3 million grant to support its work in promoting vaccinations through SMS text message reminders and Immunization Ambassadors who share information about vaccines in local communities. The grant will support these programs in two Indian states, Bihar and Maharashtra. We think these low-cost activities could lead to small but meaningful increases in vaccination rates, which in turn will mean fewer children dying of vaccine-preventable diseases. You can read more about this grant here.

This grant to Suvita was funded by GiveWell’s All Grants Fund and individual donor funding. The All Grants Fund allows donors to contribute to the most impactful grant opportunities we’ve identified, regardless of program or location. It’s a great option for donors who have a high level of trust in GiveWell and are open to programs that might be riskier or less certain than our top charities.

Research Updates

We’ve recently published a number of new research pages—below are a few highlights. If you’d like to sign up for email updates whenever we publish new research materials, you can do so here.

• Co-delivering vitamin A supplementation and seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Nigeria
  • In October 2023, GiveWell recommended a $1.4 million grant to Malaria Consortium to deliver vitamin A supplementation (VAS) alongside seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) campaigns in two states in Nigeria. Malaria Consortium already delivers seasonal malaria chemoprevention via door-to-door campaigns in these states, and this grant will fund the costs of adding VAS as part of these campaigns. We expect that Malaria Consortium will be able to deliver VAS at a low cost by leveraging its existing SMC platform, thus increasing the number of children receiving VAS and, in turn, averting a higher number of child deaths.
• Iron and folic acid supplementation in India
  • In August 2022, GiveWell recommended a $9.2 million grant to Evidence Action to provide technical assistance to the Indian government to distribute iron and folic acid (IFA) supplements to children in five states in India. Iron deficiency and anemia are associated with a range of negative physical, psychological, and cognitive effects, and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates an anemia rate of 56% among children under five across India. This grant will support the government’s anemia-reduction program by providing support with resource planning, supply chain management, policy advocacy, community training, and more. IFA supplementation seems to be effective at reducing iron deficiency and anemia; we estimate that receiving IFA supplementation reduces iron deficiency by about 70%.

Highlights from our top charities

• New Incentives
  • In its most recent newsletter, New Incentives shared an update on its 2023 enrollment goals: “We set an ambitious goal to enroll 1,517,040 infants in our program in 2023, hoping to reach at least 80%. We are thrilled to share that we reached 99.92% of this goal and enrolled more than 2.4 times the number of infants as the year before!” We think the actual number of infants reached is likely somewhat lower due to some duplicate enrollments, but roughly 1.5 million is definitely a milestone worth celebrating! By comparison, New Incentives enrolled around 600,000 infants in 2022. We’ve made a number of expansion grants (May 2022, November 2022, and May 2023) funding this growth.
• Helen Keller International
  • Helen Keller International recently released an annual report detailing the progress it made in 2023. The report indicates the organization reached more than 35 million children across 13 African countries with vitamin A supplementation. A recent grant to Helen Keller International in April 2023 supported its vitamin A supplementation work in Madagascar.

Your questions, answered

The mailbag spotlights common questions we get from donors and followers about GiveWell’s work. Have a question of your own? Email us at info@givewell.org, or post a comment to our most recent open thread.

Q. What does GiveWell do with unrestricted donations, and should I make my gift unrestricted?

A. Giving an unrestricted gift is the maximally flexible way to support GiveWell and our recommendations, and is the best option for donors who want both to support the full spectrum of GiveWell’s grantmaking and to ensure we’re able to continue doing what we do.

Our operating expenses are paid by unrestricted funding. In 2023, GiveWell hired 24 new staff members across the organization. This added capacity enabled us to take on more projects, including:

• Throughout the year, our researchers divided into small teams to conduct “red teaming” of our top charity recommendations. The goal of this process is to scrutinize our research and identify ways we can improve our decision-making, ensuring that we’re assessing interventions as critically as we did when we first funded them.
• Our outreach team was able to secure opportunities to share GiveWell’s work through media interviews and presentations at corporate workplaces. We also partnered with media figures to engage with audiences we might not otherwise reach, like our November virtual event with economist and best-selling author Emily Oster.

GiveWell also has an “excess assets” policy, which states that once we surpass a certain level of unrestricted assets available for our operations, we earmark the excess for grantmaking rather than continuing to hold it ourselves. This means that those “excess” dollars will go to the most impactful opportunities we’ve found, which could include our top charities or other highly cost-effective programs. We’re grateful for the generosity of our donors, and we’re proud that we can increase our impact through this granting process.