The GiveWell Blog

All Malaria Charity Posts

Further Scaling Our Malaria Grantmaking

(updated on: ) | by Julie Faller

Over the past five years, GiveWell has expanded the scale of our grantmaking and team substantially. We expect to grant more than $1 billion this year, more than double the $418 million we committed in 2025. Alongside this grantmaking growth, we’ve more than doubled the number of researchers on our team since the start of last year. A larger team means we can investigate a greater number of both more complex and larger funding opportunities than we could before. One area where we expect our grantmaking to increase substantially in the coming years is the prevention and treatment of malaria.

From 2027 through 2032, we’re aiming to grant at least $2.5 billion in new malaria funding, potentially several times that amount. The total amount will depend on the funding we have available, the feasibility of scaling up cost-effective malaria programs, countries’ appetite for those programs, and how opportunities within malaria compare to other grantmaking areas. This expanded support could go to organizations we currently fund (such as the Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium), as well as to new organizations and novel funding vehicles. We are still in the process of assessing which strategies for deploying new malaria funding are likely to be highly cost-effective and scalable, and are currently exploring partnerships with the Global Fund and Gavi to help rapidly scale our impact across many programs in many countries at once.

While this post focuses on our malaria work, we are also growing our grantmaking in other areas. This includes areas we have supported for many years, such as treatment for severe malnutrition, efforts to increase childhood vaccination, and programs to provide safe drinking water, as well as areas we have supported at relatively smaller scale to date, such as medical oxygen, tuberculosis control, and family planning. We currently expect to grant more than $1 billion to program areas outside malaria in 2027, and we think we could grant more with additional funding. While the scale of our grantmaking is growing, we’ll remain focused on researching the most cost‑effective ways to save and improve lives, sharing our work openly, and directing donations to help people in need as much as we can.

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The Research behind Our $276 Million Grant for Malaria Nets in DRC

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

Malaria kills around 600,000 people annually. Children under five years old in Africa account for about 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide, and around 11% of total malaria deaths are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

As part of our ongoing efforts to scale our research and funding to direct much more money where it can do extraordinary good, GiveWell recently made its largest grant ever: $276 million to fund the purchase and distribution of malaria nets in DRC through the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF). The grant is being funded by Coefficient Giving and donations to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund.

We estimate this grant will lead to the distribution of around 92 million insecticide-treated nets (ITNs), 46 million of which we think would not otherwise be distributed, and will avert approximately 67,000 deaths.

The research we conducted as part of this grant investigation led us to two key decisions:

  • First, this grant is much larger than our past funding for nets in DRC, enabling the purchase of nets for use across all 26 provinces of DRC from 2027 through 2029 and covering $60 million in distribution costs.
  • Second, the funding will shorten the time between regular net distributions to provide additional protection against malaria in up to five provinces with higher malaria burden.

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Announcing Our Largest Grant to Date

| by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell, with co-funding from Coefficient Giving, recently made our largest grant ever: $276 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) to support the procurement and distribution of 92 million nets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from 2027 through 2029. We estimate that the nets, 46 million of which we think are additional to what would otherwise be distributed, will avert roughly 67,000 deaths. We have supported AMF’s work for more than 15 years, and the insecticide-treated nets it procures and distributes remain one of the most cost-effective ways we’ve found to save lives.

This grant, which involved a more rigorous investigation process than most, is part of a larger story about scaling our team and systems to handle substantially more funding while deepening our research rigor. Last year, we directed more than $400 million to highly cost-effective programs to save and improve lives and, this year, we expect our grantmaking to approach, and possibly exceed, $1 billion. This increase in grantmaking aims to meet global needs faster and more effectively.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Alex Bowles about the questions the team set out to answer during the grant investigation.

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Looking Back to Give Better: A Webinar Recap

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell’s latest webinar took a close look at a critical step in our research process: how we’re working to evaluate past grants to understand what happened, why, and how we can use what we learn to improve our grantmaking over time.

Our research spans the full lifecycle of grants. Before we approve funding for a grant, our research team reviews academic evidence, builds cost-effectiveness models, and consults with experts to estimate the program’s expected impact. When programs near the end of their funding, we investigate whether a grant achieved the impact we initially projected. In 2025, our growing research capacity enabled us to expand this final step for select grants and publish comprehensive evaluations that we call “lookbacks.”

During the webinar, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld moderated a discussion with Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller and Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury. They covered four examples of grant lookbacks—discussing what we’ve learned and how these lessons are informing our work—and answered questions from the audience live.

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Growing GiveWell’s Largest Research Area: Malaria

| by GiveWell Staff

Despite significant progress fighting malaria over the past few decades, the disease still kills around 600,000 people annually. Malaria is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of all malaria deaths worldwide.

While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team are allowing us to take on this challenge now in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago.

Over our nineteen-year history, GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion in donations to malaria prevention programs that we estimate will save more than 235,000 lives. This is primarily through two core programs:

  • Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which provides preventive antimalarial medication to young children during the months when malaria is mostly likely to be transmitted. We have directed more than $500 million to support SMC, most via Malaria Consortium’s SMC program, one of our Top Charities.
  • Insecticide-treated nets, which are typically hung over beds or other sleeping spaces to provide protection from mosquitoes at night. We have directed more than $600 million to support net campaigns, most via Against Malaria Foundation, another of our Top Charities.

GiveWell’s overall research team has doubled in size over the past few years. Our malaria research team is the largest of our research teams, with 15 people collectively devoting more than 20,000 hours each year to our expanded efforts.

With this growth, we are working to reduce malaria deaths even further by (1) funding evidence to improve our future grantmaking decisions for core malaria prevention programs, (2) identifying ways to increase coverage of our core programs, and (3) expanding our portfolio beyond our core programs.

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Podcast Episode 29: Behind the Analysis — Assessing Past Malaria Nets Grants

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell’s research doesn’t end once we’ve made a grant. We evaluate a subset of completed grants, comparing what we thought would happen to what actually took place, then try to use what we learn to improve our future funding decisions. Over the past year, we’ve formalized and expanded this work, publishing comprehensive “lookbacks” for select grants.

A recent lookback on grants GiveWell made to fund insecticide-treated net distributions supported by the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) illustrates the growing capacity of GiveWell’s research team. We drew on multiple independent data sources, funded qualitative interviews to gather more information, and conducted a novel empirical analysis to deepen our confidence.

In this episode, based on a conversation originally aired on GiveWell’s internal podcast for staff*, GiveWell’s co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld provides additional context while GiveWell’s Chief Research and Program Officer Teryn Mattox dives deep into the details with Program Director Alex Cohen and Researcher Steven Brownstone, examining how we conducted the lookback, what we found, and how what we learned may shape our future nets grantmaking.

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