GiveWell

Karma: 4,531

GiveWell 10 Jun 2026 19:40 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Organisation Updates thread: June 2026
GiveWell Updates
- GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld was recently named to the 2026 TIME100 Philanthropy list. Last year, GiveWell directed over $400 million to programs that save and improve lives, guided by the central question that has driven us from the very beginning—where can a dollar do the most good?
Read More
- In a recent podcast episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Adam Salisbury about our growing livelihoods portfolio, focused on increasing the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. Elie and Adam discuss testing variations of cash transfers, exploring poverty graduation programs, and funding research to answer key questions about which programs are most cost-effective.
Listen Here: Expanding Our Search for Cost-Effective Ways to Reduce Poverty
- We recently granted $5 million to the DIV Fund to identify and support promising water quality and access innovations we could consider for future funding. If you’re piloting an early-stage water intervention, or know someone who is, the RFP is now open on a rolling basis.
Learn More + Apply
- GiveWell has directed more than $1 billion to malaria prevention over our history. With increased capacity on our malaria research team—our largest research subteam—we’re expanding our malaria work by funding new research, increasing coverage of core programs, and exploring interventions beyond nets and seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
Read More: Growing GiveWell’s Largest Research Area
- Over the last decade, GiveWell has directed nearly $50 million to iron fortification and supplementation programs. In a recent episode of GiveWell Conversations, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Researcher Andrew Martin about our work on iron—including how an evaluation of our 2021 grant to Fortify Health, which showed the program was roughly twice as cost-effective as projected, led us to renew our support with a $10 million grant.
Listen Here: What a Decade of Iron Funding Has Taught Us

GiveWell 13 May 2026 15:05 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Organisation Updates thread: May 2026
GiveWell Updates
- GiveWell is launching a new RFI to expand and strengthen our malaria grantmaking in Africa and help our donors make a greater impact. Expressions of interest can be submitted through one of two tracks, the first for malaria chemoprevention and vector control pilot programs and the second for research and evaluation. Submissions are due June 24.
Learn More
- Most of GiveWell’s grantmaking focuses on programs that reduce child mortality, but our growing research capacity has expanded what we’re able to evaluate and fund, including highly cost-effective programs that meaningfully improve quality of life. In a recent podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Meika Ball about our grant to MiracleFeet—an organization that expands access to clubfoot treatment—and her recent site visit to see the program in action in Côte d’Ivoire.
Listen Here: Evaluating and Funding a New Kind of Grant
- Save the date for our upcoming webinar, Looking Back to Give Better: How GiveWell Evaluates Its Grantmaking, on Tuesday, June 9. GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld will moderate a conversation with Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller about how we evaluate whether a grant achieved the impact we initially estimated—and how we use those findings to make better impact estimates over time.
Register Here
- Vitamin A supplementation has one of the strongest evidence bases of any program we’ve evaluated. But when you dig in, the evidence is more complicated than it looks. GiveWell Senior Researcher Stephan Guyenet joins CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld on the GiveWell Conversations podcast to talk about the evidence for vitamin A supplementation, the hard questions that remain, and how our expanded research capacity is helping us go deeper so we can direct funding more effectively.
Listen Here: Scrutinizing One of Our Longest-Funded Programs

GiveWell 11 May 2026 16:33 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tony Senanayake’s comment on: Impact Requires Implementation: What Dispensers for Safe Water Scale-Back Can Teach Us About Monitoring
Hi Tony, This is Mark again. Thanks for the nudge on this monitoring point!
We agree that real-time monitoring of critical activities is likely to be a cost-effective investment. For example, New Incentives (a program that provides conditional cash transfers for immunizations working with Northern Nigeria health clinics) tracks and shares with us data on cold chain failures, stockouts, rollout delays, security incidents, fraud, double treatment of children, and retention rates (see more information in this intervention report). We think this type of monitoring is a good investment for New Incentives and want others to do something similar, because it:
- Helps grantees catch and quickly address issues that would have affected impact (e.g., replacing skunked vaccines that wouldn’t have worked) and identify program improvements.
- Helps GiveWell triangulate coverage data of uncertain quality (e.g., if New Incentives clinics are usually stocked out of vaccines, that makes it unlikely that New Incentives is increasing vaccination coverage no matter what coverage surveys say)
- Informs GiveWell’s understanding of why some programs work, while others do not. For example, if stockouts caused New Incentives to not work, then we might want to fund programs to increase vaccine stock or improve allocation of vaccines in the future.
We’re still trying to understand the trade-offs between grantees doing this internally vs. externally, and we expect to learn as we go. It makes sense to me that it is usually most efficient and effective for grantees to do the core of this monitoring internally since we want them to be able to address these issues in real-time (point 1) rather than waiting for a report from an external firm. In cases where GiveWell is relying on the accuracy of this data for our decision-making (points 2 and 3), I think it makes sense to double-check data accuracy through external data quality audits and/or interviews with local stakeholders.
The same goes with standardizing. We think it’s good to have a minimum standard, but we guess there’s also variation in what’s feasible or makes sense across grantees and expect to figure that out with them. We’ve standardized monitoring and reporting within a few program areas, such as across all our recent water chlorination grants, in collaboration with our grantees (e.g., agreeing on consistent standards on what grantees are expected to track, at what frequency, and how findings should be acted on). However, we haven’t developed monitoring standards that apply across all program areas. I think there could be value in having broader principles, but, so far, we’ve prioritized addressing concrete issues we’ve identified rather than developing these broader principles. We are planning to publish more on the details of these program area-specific monitoring and reporting standards in the near-future.

GiveWell 10 Apr 2026 23:04 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Impact Requires Implementation: What Dispensers for Safe Water Scale-Back Can Teach Us About Monitoring
Hi Tony—This is Mark Walsh, a GiveWell researcher on the team responsible for pressure-testing GiveWell’s research processes and conclusions. Thank you for this thoughtful write-up!
At a high level, I agree with the central thesis: we’ve underinvested in monitoring and evaluation, relative to other components of our analysis. Like you mentioned in your post, we’ve been working to fix that, and I wanted to share a little bit more on what we’ve done so far, what we’re planning, and some other related gaps in our work.
We think this kind of external engagement with our research is valuable and makes our work better. We’d welcome feedback on the steps we’ve taken so far and where we should consider doing more.
What we’ve done
Over the past year, we’ve been working on what we call “M&E red teaming”—a systematic review of the monitoring and evaluation practices of our largest grantees, motivated by the same concerns Tony raises. We’re planning to publish our findings soon but wanted to give a brief overview.
From June to December 2025, we dedicated teams of 3-4 research staff to work full-time for roughly 3 weeks each on six program areas: our four top charities plus water chlorination and malnutrition treatment. For each program, we evaluated many of the dimensions Tony highlights in his monitoring checklist: the independence of data collectors from program staff, the neutrality of the sampling frame, the objectivity and precision of measurement approach, data quality checks and backchecks, timeliness of data, triangulation with independent sources, and whether the program is taking timely action to address any issues raised by monitoring.
Since completing the red teaming, we’ve been doing the following to make improvements:
- Setting coverage survey standards. We’ve drafted coverage survey standards that cover survey firm independence, surveyor workloads, sampling protocols, backchecks, objective verification of key outcomes, and data-sharing timelines. We’re starting to solicit feedback on these from grantees to learn more about what’s feasible.
- Making several independent monitoring grants. Since August 2025, we’ve made 14 grants for independent monitoring and evaluation (see list of grants). For example:
  - We funded four research organizations (Asante Research Institute, Innovations for Poverty Action, ORB, and Universite de Kinshasa) to conduct vaccination coverage surveys in South Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
  - We funded Marakuja to conduct a survey of net coverage, usage, and malaria burden in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
  - We funded Innovations for Poverty Action to conduct a survey of net coverage and usage, seasonal malaria chemoprevention coverage and adherence, vitamin A supplementation coverage, and vaccination coverage in Nigeria.
  - We funded IDinsight to conduct coverage surveys, health facility data quality checks, and stakeholder interviews to evaluate malnutrition programs in Northern Nigeria.
- We required each of the 12 implementing partners funded through our chlorination Request for Information to contract with external survey firms and funded the Aquaya Institute to provide guidance on best practices (e.g., chlorination measurement, E. coli measurement, sampling frames, etc.) and regular quality control checks during the data collection period. In November 2024, we also funded Aquaya to directly monitor and evaluate the in-line chlorination pilot of Uduma.
- Ensuring grantees are adequately monitoring critical activities. We’ve made it standard practice to identify the critical activities required for the desired impact and to ensure grantees have plans for monitoring these in real-time and addressing issues quickly.
- Better data on population and program costs: The red teaming highlighted these as two other areas that are central to implementation that we think we’ve underinvested in. To address this, we have funded independent population estimates in key countries, are developing budget and financial reporting templates for some program areas, and are working on internal guidance and tools for grantmakers (e.g., a dashboard with alternative population estimates and rules of thumb for when/where to trust what estimates).
As Tony suggests, we think the right way to evaluate these investments is based on the value of the information we’ll gain and the impact we think it will have on our future grantmaking decisions. That means that we are more likely to fund expensive M&E in large grantmaking areas for GiveWell (or areas with a lot of room for more funding) and where we have more uncertainty so expect the M&E to affect our grantmaking a lot. For example, we’ve funded expensive independent coverage surveys of insecticide-treated nets and vaccinations programs because we direct a lot of funding to these programs. On the other hand, we are trying to take a rigorous but lighter-touch approach in cases where there is less funding at-stake, or where key uncertainties (e.g., whether an organization can establish partnerships or hire effectively) can be resolved more cheaply before investing in expensive M&E.
What’s next
Over the next several months, we’re planning to finalize and roll out our coverage survey standards with grantees; analyze the results from the independent surveys, enhanced M&E, and population/costs work we’ve commissioned; and dig further on more of these areas (e.g., investigating better ways to monitor the impact of our grantees on disease morbidity and mortality).
I expect we’ll learn a lot as we go about what’s feasible and what information is actually most valuable. I’m sure our approach will change as we learn more about both the cost and potential impact of this information. That being said, I think we are on the right track.
A broader gap
I also want to flag that we think the issues Tony raises are part of a broader gap. It’s not just that we need better quantitative monitoring—we also need to invest more in understanding what’s actually happening on the ground with the programs we fund.
We’ve been trying to gather more “local insights” on our work. This involves site visits, qualitative research, conversations with local experts, and other ways of testing our desk-based assumptions against what’s happening on the ground. One example is funding the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics to observe vitamin A supplementation delivery in Nigeria and interview households, front-line staff, and government officials about the program.
We’re still figuring out which approaches are most useful but think shifting more of our research effort “beyond the spreadsheet” in the ways Tony is describing is directionally right and something we’re making progress on. As I said at the start, we welcome feedback on our work so far—and on our future progress as it occurs.

GiveWell 9 Mar 2026 17:26 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: EA Organisation Updates thread: March 2026
GiveWell Updates
- In our 2025 grantmaking year, GiveWell approved $418 million across 131 grants to 69 organizations—the most grants we’ve made in a year so far.
  
  Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find. Last year’s grantmaking reflects this growth, and we will be continuing an intensive effort this year to scale our ability to partner with donors to help people in need.
GiveWell’s 2025 Grantmaking: Record Grants, Expanded Reach, Crisis Response
- GiveWell recently launched two new RFIs to expand our funding in vaccination and iron fortification and supplementation programs. Submissions for both RFIs are due March 27.
  - Vaccination outreach RFI: Seeking targeted outreach or mobile vaccination programs that aim to increase uptake of routine vaccinations for children under 2 in the DRC, Nigeria, or Somalia.
  - Anemia control RFI: Seeking programs that reduce iron deficiency anemia through large-scale iron fortification, supplementation, or biofortification in Africa.
GiveWell Launches RFIs for Vaccination Outreach and Anemia Control
- GiveWell aims to find and fund programs that will do the most good per dollar, and we regularly evaluate results to decide whether to continue our support. Sometimes, even if a program we fund is doing a lot of good, it may not have the impact per dollar we expected.
  
  In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Senior Program Officer Erin Crossett discuss how we responded when early data on Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water in Malawi and Uganda indicated the program wasn’t reaching as many people as estimated.
Following the Data on Dispensers for Safe Water
- GiveWell is hiring a Salesforce Administrator to deliver exceptional technical support to our internal users and drive continuous improvements to the systems that power our life-saving work.
Apply—Salesforce Administrator

GiveWell 11 Feb 2026 22:30 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Organization Updates thread: February 2026
GiveWell Updates
- Seasonal malaria chemoprevention is one of the most cost-effective programs GiveWell has identified—but in eastern and southern Africa, we have substantial uncertainties about drug effectiveness. That’s why we’re funding the CHAMP trial, which is, to our knowledge, the largest individually randomized trial of malaria chemoprevention drugs ever conducted.
  
  In our latest podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Senior Researcher John Macke discuss what we hope to learn and how it could shape our malaria grantmaking. Subscribe here for the latest updates.
Generating Evidence for the Future of Malaria Prevention
- GiveWell is often thought of for its Top Charities, but over the last several years, we’ve been substantially broadening our work. We’ve developed new ways to identify potential grantees, funded research to fill gaps in our understanding, and explored new program areas where we believe cost-effective opportunities exist but other funders aren’t investing.
  
  In a recent podcast episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld and Senior Program Officer Julie Faller discuss how our research approach has evolved and what it means for the future of our grantmaking.
Evolving Our Research Approach for Greater Impact
- GiveWell is hiring for several positions including:

GiveWell 14 Oct 2025 14:47 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: feijão’s comment on: GiveWell is hiring Research Analysts
We are only considering full-time candidates for this role.

GiveWell 13 Oct 2025 16:25 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: feijão’s comment on: GiveWell is hiring Research Analysts
There is currently no application deadline, but we review applications on a rolling basis, so we encourage you to apply as soon as possible if interested. Thanks for your interest in the Research Analyst position!

GiveWell 28 Jul 2025 20:03 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: M. Isabella’s comment on: New podcast episode: Deepening GiveWell’s focus on livelihoods Programs
Hi there—thanks for your interest in GiveWell! We don’t currently offer informational calls, but we’d encourage you to check out our open roles and apply to any that seem like a good fit for your background and interests.

GiveWell 15 Jul 2025 22:10 UTC
16 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Sanity Check—Givewell’s New Incentives estimate seems optimistic
Hi Nick,
Thanks for noting that section of the post could have been clearer! We’ve edited the article to clarify that New Incentives went from serving 70,000 to 1.5 million children per year.
We agree that the extra lives saved (“indirect deaths” in our analysis) is an interesting question. Both the magnitude of the adjustment and the exact mechanisms (i.e., which other causes those deaths are coming from in the GBD bucket) are major sources of uncertainty in our model, and we don’t currently specify what other deaths are being averted through vaccination in our analysis. We may follow up with a post to share more about our work on indirect deaths in the future.
Thanks again for the feedback!

GiveWell 14 Jul 2025 22:30 UTC
23 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Sanity Check—Givewell’s New Incentives estimate seems optimistic
Hi Nick,

Thank you for providing this feedback! My name is Vicky, and I am a Research Associate at GiveWell, on the vaccines team. We really appreciate these kinds of rough sense checks on our work and thought this was a great approach.

Our lookback includes children enrolled across multiple years of programming (roughly covering 2020 to 2026) whereas the enrollment figures in your estimate only include a single year of program operations.
- Our lookback aims to roughly capture the impact of our grants which cover New Incentives’ operations from 2020 through 2026. The estimated 1.5 million children enrolled that you cite is based on a single operating year, 2023.^[1] We think New Incentives will enroll closer to 6.3 million children between 2020 and 2026.^[2]
- Using the same assumption that roughly 81% of children enrolled would be counterfactually vaccinated absent the program,^[3] we estimate that roughly 1.2 million children would be counterfactually vaccinated by the program from 2020 through 2026.^[4]
- This implies an upper bound of roughly 60,000 deaths averted with your approach (assuming 5% of deaths in unvaccinated children might be preventable as an upper bound).^[5]
We think this difference–the assumed number of children enrolled with GiveWell funding—is the main reason the upper bound you estimated for the number of deaths averted appears significantly lower than the estimates in our lookback, although we’re still exploring other potential discrepancies between the numbers in your approach and our estimates.^[6]

Thanks again for your engagement!
1. ^
  In 2023, New Incentives reported enrolling 1,518,904 children across 9 states. See New Incentives, 2023 Annual Report, p.8-9
2. ^
  We estimated this by taking the total amount of funding (roughly $120 million) divided by the cost per child enrolled (roughly $19 per child enrolled) between 2020 and 2024. This assumes that the cost per child enrolled between 2025 and 2026 will remain similar to the historical weighted average.
  We have not published our most recent estimates yet, but you can see our approach to estimating cost per child enrolled based on data from 2020 through 2023 here.
  New Incentives publishes enrollment figures here. When calculating the cost per child, we adjust their estimates to account for potential repeat enrollments.
3. ^
  The 81% in our public report is based on a single state, Bauchi, and the exact percentage differs across states depending on baseline coverage and New Incentives’ expected impact in that state. In addition, we’ve made some internal updates to the model since the last version of our intervention report was published.
4. ^
  6.3 million * (1 − 81%) = roughly 1.2 million children counterfactually vaccinated by the program.
5. ^
  1.2 million children counterfactually vaccinated * 5% risk of dying from causes that might be preventable through vaccination = 60,000 deaths potentially averted as an upper bound.
  The 5% risk of dying parameter is derived from two assumptions in your post:
  12.5% of unvaccinated kids might die from non-birth/neonatal and non-malarial causes.
  40% of non-birth/neonatal and non-nalarial deaths could potentially be vaccine-preventable.
  12.5% * 40% = 5%
6. ^
  Across states where the New Incentives program operates, we estimate that unvaccinated children experience roughly a 3% to 8% chance of dying from vaccine-preventable diseases and that vaccination reduces their risk of dying by roughly 50%, which appears more in-line with your estimates. For more on how we estimate these, see our public report here.

GiveWell 20 Jun 2025 17:58 UTC
19 points
2 ∶ 1
on: “Technical Support Units”—A Dubious GiveWell Grant?
Thanks for sharing your critique of our recent grants with Open Philanthropy for technical support units (TSUs). We really appreciate this thoughtful pushback! We’ve recommended (and are considering) a number of grants to help respond to the current situation with cuts in US foreign health assistance. So, getting critiques like yours is helpful since it encourages us to pause and consider whether we’re making the right tradeoffs in these grants. While we share some of your perspectives on the uncertainties of this work, we’re still excited about our decision in this case.
While this grant’s impact is particularly uncertain, we see this as a difference in degree, not kind, compared to other grants we recommend. Most of our funding still goes to Top Charities—proven programs backed by strong evidence and our cost-effectiveness analysis. But we also recommend opportunities through the All Grants Fund. The goal of this fund is to find and fund what we believe are the highest-impact uses of marginal dollars, even when those opportunities are riskier or harder to model. This grant fits squarely in that approach. We’ve funded technical assistance from the All Grants Fund before, alongside grants that are uncertain for other reasons. For example, sometimes we’re trying to generate new evidence, while at other times we’re recommending high expected value bets even when we know we’re unlikely to get a definitive answer on their impact.
We agree that the evidence base for TSUs is thin. In general, we think it’s challenging to evaluate technical assistance programs because
- particular programs might not have very convincing controls or comparators and
- technical assistance packages can vary widely so aggregating results from many programs might not be that informative, even if they’re targeting the same outcome
So even if the review that Nick cites had found good evidence for past TA programs, we still might not feel sure that it would generalize to the TSUs we recommended funding.
But as discussed above, we don’t consider high uncertainty to be a dealbreaker in grants funded from the All Grants Fund. We still think it can be worth funding TA (see, e.g., our maternal syphilis grants) and we’re very interested in building up our ability to learn about programs like this over time. (We’re working on a project looking back on a subset of technical assistance grants we’ve funded, but don’t have a publication date for that yet.)
While we don’t have detailed theories of change, we still think it’s plausible that TSUs could be impactful. We are excited about this grant because we think it could help governments to make difficult prioritization and program adaptation decisions in countries affected by US government funding freezes and cuts. We expect that the details of how this could look will vary by country and so we don’t feel confident that any particular mechanism will cash out in impact. But for example, we think TSUs could help governments to:
- Adapt programs away from more expensive models implemented with USG support to more cost-efficient models (e.g., by integrating disease-specific verticals or moving from international to local implementing organizations)
- Target programs (e.g., to certain regions or populations) based on cost-effectiveness analyses
- Crowd in philanthropic or other funding by identifying funding gaps
While we think the above examples are plausible, we agree that the theory of change for these programs is not tightly specified. However, we spoke with senior Ministry of Health officials in each country about this grant, and overall governments voiced support and demand for the proposed TSUs and were eager to have CHAI and PATH’s support on this work. We also think both organizations are well-placed to support this work, as both have supported on malaria-specific TSUs in the past, have teams with specific focus on health systems and health financing, and have established relationships with the governments they’re supporting.
Budget—Thank you for sharing your estimates—this is helpful for us as we continue to update how we review budgets. We’ll share a high level budget breakdown for this grant with our public grant write-ups (which are coming—see below!). One quick clarification (which wasn’t clear in the podcast) is that costs for Nigeria reflect support in seven states as well as national support.
Outside of that, we think that the higher budget reflects both higher salaries and a higher non-salary budget share (to account for travel, coordinating stakeholder engagement, and support from global technical teams). Our understanding is that salaries are set based on globally-benchmarked salary ranges and localized equity adjustments to account for organizational equitable pay standards and differential cost of living across different geographies. A portion of the compensation costs is also due to benefits (such as health insurance) that may be standard to each location.
Learning—We agree that we should try to learn about the impact of these grants and also agree with commenters and Nick’s revision that an RCT isn’t an appropriate strategy. We’ve asked CHAI and PATH to track and report out on the following.
- Process indicators (staff hiring, government engagement, TSU recommendations made and implemented);
- Case studies of how government prioritization decisions are made;
- Promising funding opportunities identified through the TSU work;
- Contexts where cost-effectiveness considerations are or aren’t helpful for government decision-making.
We’ll attempt to triangulate these reports through speaking with other stakeholders, though we expect we’ll still have substantial uncertainty about impact given the lack of counterfactuals.
No CEA and grant write up. These are coming! We typically have a lag between making grants and publishing our write-ups, but wanted to share about this grant sooner because we’ve received a lot of interest in our response to the funding cuts. We expect to publish pages for CHAI and PATH (including a rough BOTEC) by the end of June.
Urgency. We see the urgency here as being specifically related to governments’ needs to adapt to frozen or cut US health assistance: we heard when investigating this grant that governments were already beginning this planning process and that lighter touch versions of the support offered by TSUs were already being provided on nights and weekends by CHAI staff in certain countries. We also think this kind of grant is inherently uncertain and it didn’t seem likely that we’d reduce that uncertainty by spending additional time investigating. So, with apparent demand for support at the time and since we didn’t think waiting would lead to a better decision, we chose to recommend funding relatively quickly.

GiveWell 16 May 2025 17:34 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: New podcast episode: Supporting governments navigating US funding cuts
Hi Nick,

Thanks for reaching out and for your interest in these grants. We’re currently working on grant write-ups that we plan to publish soon, but unfortunately, we don’t have anything available to share just yet.

GiveWell 3 Apr 2024 18:43 UTC
57 points
10 ∶ 0
on: [Linkpost] Leif Wenar’s The Deaths of Effective Altruism
We want to share a few thoughts that might help clarify our approach.
Our research incorporates potential downsides or unintended consequences, such that our recommendations take into account factors like potential side effects. Most (if not all) of the information in Leif Wenar’s WIRED piece is something that anyone could find on our website. However, we believe some of what is published in the piece is misleading or inaccurate. Here is a lightly edited version of the material that GiveWell sent to WIRED in response to a request for comment on Leif Wenar’s piece.
What links here?
- [Linkpost] Leif Wenar’s The Deaths of Effective Altruism by Earthling (27 Mar 2024 15:35 UTC; 46 points)

GiveWell 5 Mar 2024 20:53 UTC
49 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Bloomberg: Unacknowledged problems with LLINs are causing a rise in malaria.
Hi Ian, thanks for sharing this article – our team wrote up some notes on how this topic intersects with our work, and I (Isabel Arjmand writing on behalf of GiveWell) thought it might be useful to share here.
Like the Bloomberg editorial board, we’re concerned about stalling progress in the fight against malaria, but we’re skeptical that quality issues with PermaNet 2.0s have influenced this progress as much as the article suggests.
All things considered, we believe that malaria nets are, and have been, highly effective in reducing malaria burden. The Against Malaria Foundation had first shared the studies highlighted above with us in 2020, and the claims in the Bloomberg article have prompted us to do some additional research.
Based on the work we’ve done so far, we aren’t convinced that decreased net quality is primarily responsible for malaria resurging in Papua New Guinea. So far, we see this as a milder negative update on nets than the article would indicate, in part because we think these tests of net quality may not be a perfect proxy for effectiveness in reducing cases and in part because we no longer fund PermaNet 2.0s (for unrelated reasons). At the same time, renewed interest in the evidence around PermaNet 2.0 quality is a nudge for us to prioritize further work to understand net quality control in general.
More detail on the implications of this research for GiveWell’s work
While we no longer fund PermaNet 2.0s because we now fund newer types of nets instead, they make up roughly 20% of nets we’ve funded historically. The studies referenced in the Bloomberg article looked at nets distributed in Papua New Guinea and indicate that the post-2012 PermaNet 2.0s perform worse on certain efficacy tests. We aren’t sure how well those efficacy tests serve as a proxy for malaria transmission (e.g. mosquitoes in these tests could be impaired from the exposure to insecticides even if it isn’t sufficient to kill them). We’re also skeptical that changes to the formulation of PermaNet 2.0s were the key driver of increased malaria cases in Papua New Guinea. During this time, we think other factors like insecticide resistance and shifts in biting patterns likely played a meaningful role (as highlighted in this paper). That said, we see these studies as a negative update on the effectiveness of those nets.
We did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (so this is more illustrative than fully baked, at this point):
- Assuming the insecticide treatment on PermaNet 2.0s was 80% less effective after 2012 would make those nets look 30-50% less effective overall than we’d previously modeled. That’s because we model roughly 30% of the benefit of nets as coming from the physical barrier in the absence of insecticide resistance, and we already discount the effectiveness of nets like PermaNet 2.0 because of insecticide resistance. We would guess that with further work, we’d estimate that 80% is on the pessimistic side of things (which would put the overall impact on net efficacy at the low end of our 30-50% range, or lower).
- Then, assuming that similar issues don’t apply to other nets (which could be wrong – we plan to look into this more), our overall nets grantmaking would look roughly 5-10% less cost-effective than we’d previously estimated, since PermaNet 2.0s are around 20% of our historical nets distributed. That proportion has varied over time. In 2018, all of the nets we funded were PermaNet 2.0s; now, we fund newer types of nets instead.
While concerns specific to PermaNet 2.0s don’t directly affect our future allocation decisions, this issue does raise more general concerns about quality control for nets. Ideally, we would have prioritized more work in this area in the past. We’re planning to learn more about quality control processes and we also want to better understand how others in the malaria field are thinking about this.
What links here?
- Money, Population, and Insecticide Resistance: Why malaria cases haven’t declined since 2015 by Paul Present (16 Mar 2025 5:31 UTC; 194 points)
- Rasool's comment on Money, Population, and Insecticide Resistance: Why malaria cases haven’t declined since 2015 by Paul Present (16 Mar 2025 10:22 UTC; 4 points)

GiveWell 7 Feb 2024 18:35 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: How we work, #1: Cost-effectiveness is generally the most important factor in our recommendations
We’ve haven’t explicitly modeled diminishing returns in this way. Most of the opportunities we consider are for specific pre-defined gaps, so they’re more discrete than something you can really scale in that continuous type of way.

GiveWell 25 Jan 2024 16:16 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: How we work, #1: Cost-effectiveness is generally the most important factor in our recommendations
We don’t select/structure our grants such that we necessarily think the “last dollar” or marginal dollar to that grant is 10x cash. For example: if there was a discrete $5M funding opportunity to support a program in a specific area, we might model the cost-effectiveness of that opportunity as say, 15x overall, but there wouldn’t be any particular reason to think the ‘last dollar’ was more like 10x. Generally, when it comes to funding discrete opportunities (e.g. vaccination promotion in a certain state in Nigeria), we don’t tend to think about the value of the first versus last dollar for that discrete opportunity, because we’re often making a binary decision about whether to support the program in that area at all. Hope this clarifies!

GiveWell 19 Jan 2024 21:55 UTC
5 points
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on: Copenhagen Consensus Center’s best investment papers for the sustainable development goals
Thanks to Vasco for reaching out to ask whether GiveWell has considered:
- e-Government procurement (benefit-to-cost ratio of 125)
- Trade (95)
- Land tenure security (21).
GiveWell has not looked into any of these three areas. We’d likely expect both the costs and the benefits to be fairly specific to the particular context and intervention. For example, rather than estimating the impact of reduced tariffs broadly, we’d ask something along the lines of: What is the intervention that can actually e.g., lead to a reduction in tariffs? On which set of goods/services would it apply? Which sets of producers would benefit from those lower tariffs? And thus, what is the impact in terms of increased income/consumption?
We think there’s a decent chance that different methodologies between Copenhagen Consensus Center and GiveWell would lead to meaningfully different bottom line estimates, based on past experience with creating our own estimates vs. looking at other published estimates, although we can’t say for sure without having done the work.

GiveWell 18 Jan 2024 20:08 UTC
24 points
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on: Malaria vaccines: how confident are we?
Thanks SoGive for the post! We wanted to share some of GiveWell’s current thinking around malaria vaccines in case it’s helpful. We also wrote a report on RTS,S in 2022 here and have recommended a couple grants for vaccine rollout and research.
On a cost-per-person-reached basis, we agree ITNs and SMC are superior to either of the two WHO-approved malaria vaccines. However, we think there’s less of a differential in cost-effectiveness than this post implies, for a number of reasons:
- The difference in all-in delivery costs is probably less substantial: We think it roughly costs $6 to deliver an ITN to a household^[1], and roughly $7 to provide a child with a full course of SMC. (See also impact metrics here). We estimate the total costs for fully immunizing a child range from $23-$43, depending on the choice of vaccine.^[2]
- We would approach the comparison for the reduction in malaria incidence differently: Using the effect size from the Pryce et al meta-analysis for ITNs (which consists mostly of trials that lasted one year) and comparing it with the incidence reduction observed after 12 months in RTS,S/R21 trials is not as straightforward as is seems:
  - The reduction found in Pryce et al has to be considerably updated in light of recent developments, notably new types of nets (PBO, dual active ingredient) and increased insecticide resistance.
  - The RTS,S Clinical Partnership trial includes results from a follow-up four years after the start of the intervention and finds a reduction in clinical malaria from 28% (3 dose group) to 36% (4-dose group) at endpoint. Our malaria team recommends these results rather than the earlier snapshots, as they are less noisy.
  - Our best guess is that R21 and RTS,S are similarly effective at preventing malaria. Available evidence suggests that short-term effectiveness is broadly similar between RTS,S and R21. No data has been published for the impact of R21 on malaria incidence over the long run (>20 months after the first dose). Because the short-term outcomes are broadly similar, and both vaccines employ the same mechanism to induce an immune response in the vaccinated person^[3], our best guess is that four doses of R21 probably offer similar levels of protection as four doses of RTS,S over the long run.
  - We believe the apparent difference cited in the post is most likely due to the different setup between trials (Datoo 2022, unlike the RTS,S trial, was carried out in a seasonal setting). Note also that results from a phase III trial on R21 are now available (Datoo 2023 (preprint)).
- The duration of protection differs: Due to factors such as attrition and physical decay, we currently estimate an ITN to provide between 1.2 − 2.0 years of effective protection. As indicated above, we estimate that malaria vaccines offer around 30% protection over four years.
There are, of course, additional factors that need to be taken into account to get a full picture (for example, what coverage levels are achievable for each intervention?). However, our current best guess is that even with those included, nets (and SMC) will be more cost-effective than malaria vaccines—just not by an order of magnitude.
1. ^
  Costs per child reached are much higher, roughly $15-$26.
2. ^
  The price per dose of RTS,S was $9.30 in 2022, and estimates for R21 indicate a price per dose of $3.90. We expect that, on average, 70% of children who received three doses will also get a booster shot, which implies vaccine costs per child between $14-$37. The best costing estimates for the delivery of the doses suggest around $9 per child.
3. ^
  “The leading malaria vaccine in development is the circumsporozoite protein (CSP)-based particle vaccine, RTS,S, which targets the pre-erythrocytic stage of Plasmodium falciparum infection. It induces modest levels of protective efficacy, thought to be mediated primarily by CSP-specific antibodies. We aimed to enhance vaccine efficacy by generating a more immunogenic CSP-based particle vaccine and therefore developed a next-generation RTS,S-like vaccine, called R21. The major improvement is that in contrast to RTS,S, R21 particles are formed from a single CSP-hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) fusion protein, and this leads to a vaccine composed of a much higher proportion of CSP than in RTS,S.” Collins et al. 2017, “Abstract”
What links here?
- Today is World Malaria Day (April 25) by Toby Tremlett🔹 (25 Apr 2024 8:48 UTC; 66 points)

GiveWell 17 Jan 2024 22:31 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: How we work, #1: Cost-effectiveness is generally the most important factor in our recommendations
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for your comment! To clarify, our funding bar being 10x cash doesn’t mean that every grant we make will be to things that are 10x cash – it means that we’ll generally fund all of the programs we find that are above 10x, and not the ones that we estimate to be below 10x (with caveats that sometimes we will/won’t make grants that fall on either side of that line for other reasons not captured in the CEA, e.g. learning value). You can read more on how we make funding decisions here.
Many of the grants we make are above 10x, including a fair amount in the 10-20x range (like this recent CHAI grant – we estimate delivering the program is ~17x cash, not counting the evaluation grants). Using Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) as an example, we fund net distribution campaigns in specific geographic regions that meet our 10x bar (see this grant made to AMF in January 2022 that supports net distribution campaigns in three Nigerian states). Theoretically, if we evaluated six states for net distribution campaigns and only four states met our criteria to be above 10x, we would only fund those four and not the other two, and the average cost-effectiveness across those 4 states would be higher than 10x.

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