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.