The GiveWell Blog

All GiveWell’s grantmaking Posts

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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An Update to GiveWell’s Grant Deployment Timelines

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell aims to save and improve lives as cost-effectively as possible. That mission has an urgency, and we put a lot of effort into finding and funding high-impact giving opportunities quickly. But we also want to maximize our impact over time, and have found that high-impact interventions can take years of investment to discover, vet, launch, and scale.

As a result, we’ve begun to deploy funds across a longer time period in order to (a) avoid a scenario where we want to make cost-effective grants but can’t due to lack of funds, (b) aid long-term planning for our research team, and (c) communicate consistent expectations to grantees and potential grantees about our cost-effectiveness threshold.

Specifically, we previously aimed to allocate all funds within the same year they were raised, targeting a year-end balance of zero. Now, we plan to enter each year with sufficient funds to fully cover our grantmaking activities for that year without accounting for new donations.This approach creates greater financial stability, which we think will allow us to plan better and to achieve greater impact over time.

If you donate to our Top Charities Fund (TCF), nothing has changed. We still expect to commit TCF donations in the quarter after they are received. These changes will only apply to our unrestricted and All Grants Fund (AGF).

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Making Predictions about Our Grants

(updated on: ) | by Hannah Bell

From sports announcers to political pundits to friends gossipping about romantic interests, lots of people make probabilistic predictions about the future. But only some actually follow up to see how well their predictions performed. For instance, you may have heard that weather forecasters predicted that the 2024 hurricane season had an 85% chance of being more active than normal and there would be 17 to 25 named storms. But in September, they were surprised that so far, it had been unexpectedly quiet, with climate change likely affecting weather patterns in ways scientists don’t fully understand.

GiveWell researchers often make forecasts about activities, milestones, and outcomes of the programs and research studies we recommend funding for, as well as decisions that GiveWell will make in the future. For example, we might forecast whether we’ll fund more hospital programs to implement Kangaroo Mother Care programs by 2027, or whether data collected about how many people are using chlorinated water will align with our expectations.

As a way to solicit external feedback on some of our predictions, we just launched a page on Metaculus, an online forecasting platform. Periodically, we will post forecasts there about GiveWell’s research and grants for the public to make their own predictions. Metaculus and other contributors will award $2,250 in prizes to people who leave insightful comments on a select group of forecasting questions. The deadline for comments is December 1, 2024.

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How Do You Value Information?

| by Uri Bram

There’s a common piece of dating advice: before you commit, go on a big trip together. Hopefully the trip itself will be fun, but that’s (almost) beside the point: the real goal is to figure out how smoothly you solve problems together. When it starts raining at 10pm on a Friday and you’re caught outdoors because of a misread-map incident (if we’re being honest: entirely your fault), you’re going to learn a lot about whether your partner reacts to difficulties in a way you’d like to be around for the rest of your life.

The value of what you learn from the trip (a concept called “value of information,” or VOI) can far exceed the direct costs and benefits, because the trip is just for a week and the rest of your life is, well, the rest of your life. If there’s a 10% chance that the trip will show you that you’re not truly compatible, the expected value of that information is higher than any plausible level of (un)happiness you might experience on the trip itself.

Sometimes, the value of information makes the trip worth taking when it wouldn’t have been otherwise—your partner has already scheduled a trip during their time off and it’s very inconvenient for you to join them, but the value of information makes the trip worth it. Other times, you can make choices about the trip in order to increase the value of information you’ll receive: perhaps an all-inclusive beach resort would be more enjoyable today, but a road trip where you camp at different spots each night has a higher value of information and so is ultimately more valuable.

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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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Research Strategy: Vaccines

| by Natalie Crispin

GiveWell started supporting vaccines in 2015 and has made over $160 million in grants to date. With strong results from past work in this space, we’re now exploring how to reach more people with vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. This post discusses our current thinking on vaccines grantmaking and our key hypotheses about where to focus our efforts going forward.

Where are we now?

Before this year, our grants for vaccine programs focused on (a) increasing uptake of the vaccines given to children in the first two years of life, and (b) speeding up the rollout of malaria vaccines.

Relative to other global health approaches, vaccines garner a lot of attention. Governments in high-income countries contribute to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which heavily subsidizes the purchasing of vaccines in the world’s poorest countries and provides cash assistance to help these countries deliver them. The Gates Foundation is also a major contributor to vaccine programs. These efforts have been fairly successful—in 2022, 81% of children in the 57 low-income countries supported by Gavi had received the DTP3 vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. DTP3 coverage is often used as a benchmark for progress on vaccination.

This provides both a challenge and an opportunity for finding cost-effective giving opportunities. On the one hand, thankfully, the people who are easiest to reach with vaccines are already being reached, which means more expensive or innovative methods are needed to expand coverage. On the other hand, we can build on the extensive knowledge and infrastructure that already exists.

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