The GiveWell Blog

GiveWell’s 2025 Grantmaking: Record Grants, Expanded Reach, Crisis Response

In our 2025 grantmaking year, GiveWell approved $418 million in grants to highly cost-effective programs in order to save and improve lives as much as we can. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find. Last year’s grantmaking reflects this growth, and we will be continuing an intensive effort this year to scale our ability to partner with donors to help people in need.

Between February 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, GiveWell approved 131 grants to 69 organizations—the most grants we’ve made in a year so far. This post provides an overview of the kinds of grants we made and the impact we had last year. This was only possible thanks to the generosity of our donors. We’re incredibly grateful for the trust you place in our research and for your partnership in trying to do the most good we can together.

Increased Grantmaking

In 2025, we launched more than 200 formal grant investigations, after reviewing many additional promising opportunities. Tens of thousands of hours went into this research, which resulted in 131 approved grants. This is more than double the number of grants we approved during 2024, and resulted in a year-over-year increase of more than 20% in total grantmaking dollars.

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Podcast Episode 24: Testing New Strategies to Increase Vaccination Coverage

Vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing deadly diseases, and, while global needs for them are great, vaccines already receive substantial global funding. This creates a challenge: How do you identify opportunities where additional funding can meaningfully increase vaccination rates and save lives?

GiveWell has long recognized the potential for highly cost-effective vaccine programs. We started supporting vaccination programs in 2015 and have made over $200 million in vaccination-related grants to date. For example, New Incentives, one of our Top Charities, aims to increase routine childhood vaccinations in northern Nigeria by providing small cash incentives to caregivers who bring their children into clinics for vaccinations.

Over the past several years, we’ve been growing our research team and laying the groundwork to expand the scope of our work and funding.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Natalie Crispin, who leads GiveWell’s vaccination grantmaking. They discuss how our research approach has evolved and what it means for helping more children access life-saving vaccinations.

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Podcast Episode 23: Generating Evidence for the Future of Malaria Prevention

Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC)—a program that provides preventive antimalarial medication to young children during the months when malaria is mostly likely to be transmitted—is one of the most cost-effective programs GiveWell has identified. Malaria Consortium’s SMC program has been one of our Top Charities since 2016, and we’ve recommended more than $500 million in grants to the program.

Most of our funding to date has supported programs in West Africa, where strong evidence gives us confidence in the effectiveness of the drug combination used. In eastern and southern Africa, malaria chemoprevention programs could potentially help many more children, but we have substantial uncertainties about drug effectiveness in that region.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Researcher John Macke about the CHAMP trial, a randomized controlled trial of chemoprevention drugs we’re supporting in Malawi, and how it could shape our malaria grantmaking.

This research is one example of how GiveWell is building for the future: investing in research now that could substantially expand our ability to direct funding cost-effectively in the years ahead.

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Podcast Episode 22: Evolving Our Research Approach for Greater Impact

GiveWell is often thought of for its Top Charities, but over the last several years, we’ve been substantially broadening our work. We’ve developed new ways to identify potential grantees, funded research to fill gaps in our understanding, and explored new program areas where we believe cost-effective opportunities exist but other funders aren’t investing. This increased breadth isn’t a goal in itself—we’ve been laying the groundwork to deliver more impact, now and in the future.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about how our research approach has evolved and what it means for the future of our grantmaking.

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Podcast Episode 21: Testing Our Assumptions through Local Insights

GiveWell has built its reputation on rigorous research—analyzing randomized controlled trials, building cost-effectiveness models, and reviewing monitoring data to identify cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives. In an effort to supplement this desk research and make better decisions, we’ve been working to gather more information directly from the people who live and work in the countries where we fund programs.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Principal Researcher Alex Cohen about GiveWell’s work to gather local insights to check our assumptions and figure out what we might be missing.

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Podcast Episode 20: Taking Lessons from a Year of Aid Cuts into 2026

Global health programs faced major disruptions to their funding in 2025. Back in March, we published our first podcast episode to share a timely snapshot of the immediate impacts caused by the foreign aid freeze and GiveWell’s initial response strategy. It was unclear whether and when funding would resume, and what the medium and long-term implications would be for life-saving programs.

Over the last year, GiveWell has drawn on almost two decades of cost-effectiveness research and analysis to assess the effects of this tumult in real time, identify gaps where funding could have exceptional impact, and prepare for future needs. We’ve made nearly $50 million in grants in direct response to funding cuts, as part of our expected total grantmaking of around $350 million for the year.

In our final episode of the year, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Director of Research Teryn Maddox follow-up on their first podcast conversation to look back at GiveWell’s response: Where did we succeed? What did we get wrong? Where could we have done better? How did our response evolve? And what might all of this mean for the world and our work in 2026?

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