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.

GiveWell’s Grantmaking Scope

While we’re often known for our top charities list, you might be surprised to learn that most of our research capacity goes toward programs other than our top charities. This is because (a) most programs we direct funding to aren’t top charities, and (b) it requires more effort to investigate a program we know less deeply.

Our top charities continue to be our top recommendations for donors who prioritize confidence in their giving—they have strong track records of delivering programs at large scale, they can absorb more funding, and we’ve followed their work for years. But because we have such strict criteria for top charities, we’d be limiting our impact if we only recommended funding to them. Some highly cost-effective programs might not meet those criteria, and we don’t want to artificially constrain the impact we can have.

Our latest blog post looks at the overall scope of GiveWell’s grantmaking, why we dedicate funding and research capacity to programs other than our top charities, and the types of opportunities we support.

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.

• Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA)—Unrestricted Funding
  • In December 2023, GiveWell recommended a $787,500 grant to the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at the University of California, Berkeley, to support its work on high-quality research in global health and development. The grant is unrestricted—we expect it may be used for activities such as seed funding for graduate students or early-career researchers, policy dissemination, or filling gaps CEGA perceives in the global development research ecosystem.
• Evidence Action—Coverage Surveys of Iron and Folic Acid Supplementation
  • In January 2024, GiveWell recommended a $97,000 grant to Evidence Action to conduct baseline coverage surveys of iron and folic acid (IFA) supplementation in two Indian states, Karnataka and Tripura. IFA supplementation is used to reduce anemia, which is most commonly caused by iron deficiency and can lead to a range of adverse physical and cognitive effects. We’ve directed around $13.7 million to support Evidence Action’s technical assistance program for IFA supplementation in five other Indian states since 2018, and understanding baseline prevalence in Karnataka and Tripura will help us decide whether to make a larger grant to increase IFA coverage in these additional states.
• IRD Global—Mobile Conditional Cash Transfers for Immunizations
  • In February 2023, GiveWell recommended a $2.7 million grant to IRD Global to support its vaccination work in Sindh Province, Pakistan. With these funds, IRD will provide technical assistance and operational support for a government-run database of immunization records, send SMS reminders to caregivers to bring their children in for routine vaccinations, and run a mobile phone-based conditional cash transfer (mCCT) program in seven districts with low baseline vaccination coverage.

Partner Updates

• New Incentives
  • New Incentives recently published a photo blog post chronicling a day with a mobile vaccination team in northern Nigeria’s Kano State. The team travels to remote villages to reach babies who have missed appointments or have not yet been brought into a clinic for routine childhood vaccinations.
• Helen Keller International
  • Helen Keller International recently published a blog post highlighting its campaigns for vitamin A supplementation for children under five years old. Helen Keller International estimates that it reached nearly 35 million children last year with twice-annual vitamin A supplementations.
• Malaria Consortium
  • The fifth Annual Meeting of the Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention (SMC) Alliance was held in Abuja, Nigeria, earlier this month. GiveWell researchers were excited to attend this meeting to network and collaborate with other key SMC program funders and implementers. It marked an exciting milestone in SMC program history—in 2023, for the first time, over 50 million children were reached with SMC treatment in one year. Read more about this historical achievement in Malaria Consortium’s recent news release.