The GiveWell Blog

All Vaccine charity Posts

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.

Read More

GiveWell Launches RFIs for Targeted Vaccination Outreach in Three Countries and Anemia Control Programs in Africa

| by GiveWell Staff

GiveWell is launching two new requests for information (RFI) to expand GiveWell’s funding for vaccination outreach and anemia control programs. We’re excited to replicate the success of last year’s water chlorination RFI and explore how to reach even more people in low- and middle-income countries with programs to save and improve lives.

The first RFI seeks organizations that would like to implement targeted vaccination outreach or mobile vaccination programs in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Nigeria, or Somalia. The second seeks programs that reduce iron deficiency anemia through large-scale food fortification, targeted iron supplementation, and iron biofortification in Africa.

These RFIs are just one component of our expanding efforts to find and fund high-impact ways to help people in need. We’re making them public in an effort to reach as many organizations as possible, and we encourage you to share them with your networks. Submissions for both RFIs are due March 27.

Read More

Podcast Episode 24: Testing New Strategies to Increase Vaccination Coverage

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

Vaccines are remarkably effective at preventing deadly diseases, and, while global needs for them are great, vaccines already receive substantial global funding. This creates a challenge: How do you identify opportunities where additional funding can meaningfully increase vaccination rates and save lives?

GiveWell has long recognized the potential for highly cost-effective vaccine programs. We started supporting vaccination programs in 2015 and have made over $200 million in vaccination-related grants to date. For example, New Incentives, one of our Top Charities, aims to increase routine childhood vaccinations in northern Nigeria by providing small cash incentives to caregivers who bring their children into clinics for vaccinations.

Over the past several years, we’ve been growing our research team and laying the groundwork to expand the scope of our work and funding.

In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Natalie Crispin, who leads GiveWell’s vaccination grantmaking. They discuss how our research approach has evolved and what it means for helping more children access life-saving vaccinations.

Read More

Finding and Vaccinating More Children

| by GiveWell Staff

We’re crossposting the first part of a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives aims to increase vaccination coverage in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers.

We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. However, we hope that this post, about New Incentives’ efforts to reach zero-dose children, can provide another angle for understanding the efforts of our Top Charities.

Read More

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.

Read More

100 Miles of Monitoring

(updated on: ) | by GiveWell Staff

We’re crossposting a blog post by New Incentives, one of our grantee organizations and Top Charities. New Incentives promotes vaccination in Northern Nigeria by providing cash incentives to parents and caregivers. Recently, one of New Incentives’ field officers wrote about his experience collecting program data.

GiveWell asks all of our Top Charities to share detailed monitoring information, which we review to assess the quality of program implementation and the number of children reached. We also use this data as part of our cost-effectiveness analyses, which are the basis of our funding decisions.

We’re sharing this post to provide a firsthand account of how that monitoring data is collected. We recognize that individual stories about a program can be misleading, as they can often highlight the best examples rather than typical cases. Still, we hope Sanusi’s experience opens one small window into the efforts our Top Charities take to ensure high-quality implementation.

Read More

Next Page »