Water quality is a significant area of grantmaking for GiveWell. Since 2022, we’ve directed around $120 million to water quality interventions, including a $65 million grant in 2022 to support Evidence Action’s chlorine dispenser program in Kenya, Uganda, and Malawi, and a $39 million grant in 2023 to support Evidence Action’s work assisting the scale up of in-line chlorination in two states in India.
We think that chlorination programs like these are likely to be highly cost-effective because chlorine is cheap, and based on our research, we think it can have a substantial impact in reducing child mortality.
In June, we wrote about our current plans for our water grantmaking portfolio. As we mentioned then, one of our highest-priority goals is to expand the number of implementers of large-scale chlorination programs. This is because our current grantmaking relies heavily on Evidence Action, which does not operate in some of the places where we think chlorination could look most cost-effective, such as parts of Francophone Africa.
Towards this goal, we are launching a public request for information (RFI) to identify organizations who would be interested in implementing chlorination programs in our highest-priority countries.