The GiveWell Blog

All GiveWell’s grantmaking Posts

Podcast Episode 9: Advancing GiveWell’s Work on Family Planning

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

As GiveWell’s research team grows, our goal is to compare as wide a range of programs as we can to find the most cost-effective opportunities to help people. Over the past year and a half, we’ve been investigating family planning services that help people decide whether and when to have children as a new area of research.

Family planning programs have particularly complex challenges around targeting, logistics, and ensuring informed and voluntary choice. However, GiveWell’s increasing research capacity positions us to now take on new and complex investigations like this. Over the past year, we’ve been  reviewing evidence, consulting with experts, modeling the benefits of contraception, and conducting initial grant investigations, focusing on programs that aim to increase access to and use of modern contraception. This work is especially timely as anticipated cuts to foreign assistance could reduce existing family planning support by around 50%, creating significant new funding gaps.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with researcher Dilhan Perera about the complexity of evaluating family planning programs. They explore the types of programs GiveWell is considering, the unique challenges this area presents, and key questions we’re working to answer.

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Podcast Episode 7: Deepening GiveWell’s Focus on Livelihoods Programs

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question?

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about why GiveWell is dedicating more capacity to researching livelihoods programs that aim to increase people’s incomes. They discuss how we’re building on existing work, searching for new cost-effective opportunities, and exploring more of the impactful programs we’ve long cared about.

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What We’ve Learned from Our First Lookbacks

(updated on: ) | by Alex Cohen

Bar chart showing the change in expected deaths averted. For New Incentives, the estimate increased from 17,000 to 27,000. For Helen Keller Intl, the estimate decreased from 2,000 to 450.

At GiveWell, we’re committed to understanding the impact of our grantmaking and improving our decisions over time. That’s why we’ve begun conducting “lookbacks”—reviews of past grants, typically two to three years after making them, that assess how well they’ve met our initial expectations and what we can learn from them.

We conduct lookbacks for two main reasons: accountability and learning. By examining both the successes and challenges of past grants and publishing those findings on our website, we aim to be transparent about the impact of donor funding. Systematically reviewing past grants also helps us identify ways to improve our decision-making. When lookbacks identify challenges, lower-than-expected impact, or key questions that we think we should have an answer to, we use these findings to adjust our approach to similar grants in the future or prioritize follow-up research. When lookbacks show higher-than-expected impact, that’s valuable, too—in those cases, we made the error of underestimating impact and might be granting too little to certain programs.

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Podcast Episode 4: Supporting Governments Navigating US Funding Cuts

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

Cuts to US government foreign assistance have created unprecedented challenges for global health programs. Countries that have relied on this funding must now navigate substantial gaps and make difficult decisions about program priorities.

In the fourth episode of GiveWell’s podcast series on these cuts, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Dan Brown about grants to create technical support units (TSUs) in six African countries. These TSUs will provide support to the ministries of health in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda, and Zambia as they navigate funding transitions to maintain essential health services. The work is being led by the respective governments, and the support will be tailored to their individual priorities, as well as the work they have already done.

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GiveWell Is Looking to Fund Pilots of Water Chlorination Programs

| by Keir Bradwell

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.

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Research Strategy: Cross-Cutting

| by Alex Cohen

GiveWell’s cross-cutting team works to improve GiveWell’s grantmaking by tackling complex research questions that cut across grantmaking areas, reviewing our research and grants, and ensuring transparency and legibility in our findings. This post explains more about our role, how we think the work we do helps GiveWell’s grantmaking, and our current areas of focus.

What does the cross-cutting team do?

The GiveWell research team’s goal is to find and fund the most cost-effective giving opportunities in global health and development. While our grantmaking teams are focused on funding programs in their specific areas (malaria, vaccines, nutrition, water, livelihoods, and new areas), the cross-cutting team addresses research questions that span across different areas of our work.

We do this in a few ways:

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