The GiveWell Blog

All GiveWell’s grantmaking Posts

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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GiveWell’s 2024 Giving Recommendations

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

Our three Giving Funds—all of which focus on maximizing the impact of your gift—were designed for donors with different preferences, and we encourage you to donate to the one that makes the most sense for you:

  • If you trust GiveWell to decide where and when to allocate your donation, we recommend you donate to our Unrestricted Fund, which can be spent on any GiveWell priority, including both grantmaking and our own operating expenses. We often use unrestricted funding for our operating expenses, but when we have more than we need, we allocate the rest to grantmaking.
  • If you trust GiveWell’s research and want to limit your donation to grantmaking, we recommend you donate to the All Grants Fund, which makes rolling grants to the highest-impact opportunities we can identify in global health and well-being, including some with high expected value that carry a higher risk of not achieving their potential impact.
  • If you want your donation to be allocated quickly to the programs we’re most confident about, we recommend you donate to the Top Charities Fund. We expect to commit donations to this fund, which are used for the highest-priority funding needs at our four Top Charities, in the quarter after they are received.

We think donors can do a huge amount of good by supporting these funds. The rest of this post describes some of the work that donations to these funds have enabled over the past year.

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