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GiveWell’s 2025 Metrics and Impact

| by GiveWell Staff

Thanks to the trust and generosity of our donors, GiveWell raised $616 million in metrics year 2025, an increase of 49% from 2024. We directed $427 million to support outstanding opportunities to do good in 32 countries. We estimate that the programs supported by the funds we directed this year will save an additional 86,000 lives.

We have spent years growing our research capacity and scope to enable us to direct significantly more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find, and 2025 was a milestone in that ongoing growth. We responded to urgent needs generated by foreign aid cuts, and we continued to find and fund a growing number and a wider range of high-impact ways to help people. We anticipate our total grantmaking is likely to approach or even exceed $1 billion in 2026, and we are working toward a future that could be several times that scale.

And yet, global needs still far exceed available resources. More than four million young children die in low- and middle-income countries every year—and most of those deaths are preventable. As our team works toward our goal of helping people at a much larger scale, we’re grateful to the donors whose support enables us to continue to find and fund highly cost-effective programs that save or improve lives the most.

See our full 2025 metrics report for more details behind the money we raised, the funds we directed, operational expenses, donor metrics, and the impact we had last year.

Map with some countries highlighted in blue

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GiveWell’s 2024 Metrics and Impact

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

Thanks to the generosity of more than 30,000 donors, GiveWell raised $415 million and directed $397 million to cost-effective programs in metrics year 2024 (February 2024 to January 2025). We approved 55 grants to 34 organizations working in 22 countries. We estimate that the programs supported by these grants will help around 34 million people who would not otherwise have been reached and will save an additional 74,000 lives.

We’re incredibly grateful to our donors for the trust they place in our research and for their partnership in trying to do the most good we can together. See this blog post and our full 2024 metrics report for more details behind the money we raised, the funds we directed, operational expenses, donor metrics, and the impact we had last year.

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Results from GiveWell’s First Grantee Survey

| by Matt Wang

Recently, the GiveWell research team has focused on collecting more feedback about our work and processes, such as through our Change Our Mind contest, our Research Council, and by asking donors for feedback. While we typically ask for candid, live feedback from the organizations we work with, we had not previously invited anonymous assessment of our grantmaking process. We know our processes are different from those of many other funders, and we want to make sure our work reflects our values of maximizing global well-being, transparency, truth-seeking, and considerateness.

So, in July 2024, we sent out our first anonymous survey to people we’ve worked with during grant investigations. The survey was sent to 55 individuals representing 40 organizations that participated in a GiveWell grant investigation from January 1, 2022, to March 31, 2024. It focused on their experiences with our process and post-grant follow-up, and also included a few general questions asking for their feedback about GiveWell. We received 32 responses to the survey, a response rate of 58%. Two of the 32 responses were from organizations that did not receive a grant.

What we learned

Overall, the people who responded to our survey rated their satisfaction with GiveWell’s investigation process as 4.2 out of 5. The highest-rated areas were responsiveness and respectful communication, well-reasoned information requests, and satisfaction with the post-investigation process.

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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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GiveWell’s 2022 metrics report

| by Isabel Arjmand

In 2022, the most recent year for which data is available and analyzed, GiveWell raised the largest amount of money in our history, over $600 million. We thank our donors for continuing to trust us to find and recommend highly cost-effective giving opportunities. The following table summarizes our funds raised and our funds directed to programs in metrics year 2021 and 2022.

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