GiveWell

Karma: 4,392

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
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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
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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; 193 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
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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’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
1 ∶ 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 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
1 ∶ 0
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
2 ∶ 0
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
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
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.

GiveWell 17 Jan 2024 21:44 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sanjay’s comment on: How We Plan to Approach Uncertainty in Our Cost-Effectiveness Models
Hi Sanjay—thanks for the close read! You’re right that Figure 3 should read 95%, not 90% - we’re working on correcting the figure and will update the post ASAP. Thanks again!

GiveWell 3 Jan 2024 16:26 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MHR🔸’s comment on: How We Plan to Approach Uncertainty in Our Cost-Effectiveness Models
Hi there—thanks so much for catching this! Our malnutrition CEA is not yet public because it’s still a work-in-progress. I’ve removed the hyperlink accordingly. Thanks again!

GiveWell 22 Dec 2023 22:36 UTC
12 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: My quick thoughts on donating to EA Funds’ Global Health and Development Fund and what it should do
Hi Vasco and Caleb, we appreciate the interest in the Global Health and Development Fund! This is Isabel Arjmand responding on behalf of GiveWell.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to manage this fund, and we think it’s a great opportunity for donors who want to support highly cost-effective global health and development programs. We’re also interested in having more in-depth conversations with Caleb and others involved in EA Funds about what the future of this fund should look like, and we’ll reach out to schedule that.
In the meantime, here are some notes on our grantmaking and how donations to the fund are currently used.
- We expect the impact of giving to the Global Health and Development Fund (GHDF) is about the same as giving to GiveWell’s All Grants Fund: both go to the most impactful opportunities we’ve identified (across programs and organizations), and are a good fit for donors who’d like to support the full range of our grantmaking, including higher-risk grants and research. The online description of GHDF was written before the All Grants Fund existed (it launched in 2022), and the two funds are now filling a very similar niche. Caleb, we’d love to collaborate on updating the GHDF webpage to both reflect the existence of the All Grants Fund and include more recent grant payout reports.
- In the broadest sense, GiveWell aims to maximize impact per dollar. Cost-effectiveness is the primary driver of our grantmaking decisions. But, “overall estimated cost-effectiveness of a grant” isn’t the same thing as “output of cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet.” (This blog post is old and not entirely reflective of our current approach, but it covers a similar topic.)
- The numerical cost-effectiveness estimate in the spreadsheet is nearly always the most important factor in our recommendations, but not the only factor. That is, we don’t solely rely on our spreadsheet-based analysis of cost-effectiveness when making grants.
  - We don’t have an institutional position on exactly how much of the decision comes down to the spreadsheet analysis (though Elie’s take of “80% plus” definitely seems reasonable!) and it varies by grant, but many of the factors we consider outside our models (e.g. qualitative factors about an organization) are in the service of making impact-oriented decisions. See this post for more discussion.
  - For a small number of grants, the case for the grant relies heavily on factors other than expected impact of that grant per se. For example, we sometimes make exit grants in order to be a responsible funder and treat partner organizations considerately even if we think funding could be used more cost-effectively elsewhere.
  - To add something to our top charities list (vs. make a grant from the All Grants Fund / GHDF), we want a high degree of confidence in the program. See our list of additional criteria for top charities here; some of those criteria aren’t proxies for cost-effectiveness, but are instead capturing whether a program provides the confidence and direct case for impact that donors expect from that product.
  - Also, we recognize it was confusing to have GiveDirectly on our top charity list when we believed our other top charities were substantially more cost-effective. Now, our list of top charities is limited to the programs that we think can most cost-effectively use marginal funding (currently, programs we believe to have room for more funding that is at least 10x unconditional cash transfers); see the fourth bullet point here.
What links here?

GiveWell 21 Nov 2023 21:57 UTC
11 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Are GiveWell’s malaria charity recommendations up to date?
This is Isabel Arjmand from GiveWell. Thanks for the question!

We continue to recommend both the Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program as top charities (https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities). We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the burden of malaria, and are supporting programs like vaccine rollouts where we see promising opportunities (e.g. these two grants: https://www.givewell.org/research/grants/PATH-malaria-vaccines-January-2022, https://www.givewell.org/research/grants/PATH-perennial-malaria-chemoprevention-rtss-malaria-vaccine-study-february-2023).

We’ve seen the NYT coverage and are following the relevant issues it covers (e.g. insecticide resistance, for which we include an adjustment in our modeling). We wrote a bit about the news coverage here (https://twitter.com/GiveWell/status/1709634481047425423). The bottom line is that we continue to think the Against Malaria Foundation and Malaria Consortium’s SMC program are great opportunities for donors.

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