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Bringing Routine Vaccines Closer to Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

| by GiveWell Staff

Routine childhood immunizations, provided on a set schedule over a child’s first two years of life, are very effective at reducing some of the major causes of death in young children. We estimate that in the provinces where we’ve supported programs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), about one in 13 unvaccinated children dies from vaccine-preventable diseases before the age of five, yet only about half of children there receive the vaccinations they need.

Much of our Vaccination research subteam’s work focuses on finding ways to make it easier for caregivers to have their children vaccinated, such as bringing vaccines closer to where parents and infants live. This is especially important in places like DRC, where coverage is low and disease burden is high. Following a request for proposals and a request for information seeking targeted vaccination outreach programs, we funded 11 additional programs, run by distinct organizations—six of which will be implemented in DRC. This portfolio builds on years of investment in our research team, which allowed us to evaluate more than 100 proposals and fund several programs side by side to learn which approaches work best.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Natalie Crispin, who leads GiveWell’s vaccination grantmaking, about the programs we funded in DRC. They discuss barriers preventing many children in DRC from getting vaccinated, how the programs we’re funding aim to reach them, and what we hope to learn.

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Behind the Research: How Our Team Tackles Hard Questions

| by GiveWell Staff

In an effort to direct substantially more funding to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find to help people, GiveWell’s research is expanding in two directions at once: going broader, to cover more areas of global health and development, and going deeper, to improve the inputs that inform our decision-making.

This episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how this expansion is playing out on GiveWell’s research team, as three researchers each describe a project they have taken on: reassessing how to prevent childhood pneumonia deaths, building a better estimate of how many children die of malaria, and developing an AI tool to check our work for errors.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera, Senior Researcher James Watson, and Research Analyst Meghna Ray about the projects they’ve worked on and what it’s like to do research at GiveWell.

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Pressure-Testing Our Research as GiveWell Grows

| by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell works to continually improve our research so we can make better grant decisions and direct donations where we believe they can do the most good. GiveWell’s Cross-Cutting research subteam is an important part of that effort—it investigates the impact of the programs we fund, works to resolve our largest uncertainties, and aims to improve our research. As GiveWell’s grantmaking grows, the Cross-Cutting subteam is strengthening our data collection and analysis to support that growth.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Alex Cohen, who leads the Cross-Cutting subteam, about how better data can improve our decision-making, our work to gather stronger evidence, and the ways we’ve tested AI as a tool to increase our research capacity and quality.

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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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Finding the Bottlenecks in Family Planning Access

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

When GiveWell investigates a new cause area, we’re often focused on two priorities: directing funding where we think it can help people most and generating evidence to inform larger investments later. Family planning is a clear example. Recent foreign aid cuts—including reductions from the US, UK, and Dutch governments—deepened an already substantial need and opened up new cost-effective funding opportunities.

When we published our last podcast episode on family planning, GiveWell had made only a couple of small grants. Since then, we’ve made a number of additional grants totaling around $20 million, exemplifying how our growing research capacity and expertise enable us to expand into new areas. By doing so, we aim to move more donor funding faster to global health programs where it can do extraordinary good.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera about the family planning programming we’ve funded over the past year, how we’ve structured our grant portfolio, and what we’re hoping to learn.

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Tackling Diarrheal Disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan

| by GiveWell Staff

Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death for children under five, killing more than 400,000 children every year. GiveWell has funded several programs to prevent and treat diarrhea, and we recently expanded our work by making a grant to support the implementation and evaluation of WASHmobile in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. The program, which was developed by Johns Hopkins University, delivers water treatment supplies and hygiene messaging to households at the highest risk of diarrheal disease. It has shown promising results in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) but hasn’t yet been implemented at scale in the challenging settings where the need is greatest.

In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett, who leads GiveWell’s water research subteam, about the grant. They discuss how the program works, what prior research tells us about its potential, the significant uncertainties involved, and what GiveWell expects to learn.

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