The GiveWell Blog

All posts by Marinella Capriati

Research Strategy: Nutrition

| by Marinella Capriati

GiveWell has made several grants in the nutrition space to date—we’ve funded vitamin A supplementation through Helen Keller International for many years, and have made grants supporting both iron fortification and supplementation and community-based management of acute malnutrition. This year, we started systematically exploring nutrition as a grantmaking area.

Our key goal for the year is to learn more about the space. To discipline ourselves, we put down a few hypotheses about nutrition grantmaking. It is quite likely we will change our mind on these as we learn more.

Hypothesis 1: Iron and vitamin A deficiency are the most promising areas for grantmaking

Overall, we think iron and vitamin A deficiency are the most promising areas for grantmaking because of their high burden and because there are programs (fortification and supplementation) that offer tractable and cost-effective ways of addressing this burden.

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Why malnutrition treatment is one of our top research priorities

(updated on: ) | by Marinella Capriati

We believe malnutrition is a very promising area for charitable funding in the future. In 2021, we directed nearly $30 million to two organizations—The Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA) and International Rescue Committee (IRC)—working on malnutrition, and we expect to direct more funding to malnutrition programs in the future. (We have published a write-up about one of these grants here and will publish write-ups about the other grants in the near future.) To give a sense of what we expect, we would not be surprised if GiveWell directs as much funding to malnutrition in the future as we have to malaria programs in recent years.

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