Show Notes
Malaria is the cause area where GiveWell has directed the most funding over our 18-year history. We’ve recommended over $1 billion to malaria programs, which we estimate will avert over 200,000 deaths, mostly in young children, through support for programs like Against Malaria Foundation’s insecticide-treated nets and Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention.
Despite significant progress against malaria in the past 25 years, malaria is still a leading cause of death globally for children under five. The current status of malaria prevention—and all the progress that’s been made—is now in a precarious position. Significant reductions in funding from key donors like the US President’s Malaria Initiative and the Global Fund are anticipated and threaten to create substantial new gaps in life-saving malaria programs.
In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Officer Alex Bowles and Senior Researcher Rosie Bettle about the impacts these funding cuts could have. They offer a timely look at the uncertainty of the funding landscape, the life-saving malaria programs that are most at risk, and how GiveWell is leveraging its expertise to respond to emerging needs.
Elie, Alex, and Rosie discuss: The impact of foreign aid funding cuts: Significant funding cuts for malaria are expected, potentially in the range of 20% to 30%. This has prompted the Global Fund to instruct recipient countries to prepare for cuts across its malaria programs, forcing countries to reorganize entire malaria campaigns in just two months—a process that normally takes a full year. Program prioritization decisions: Countries are facing difficult choices as a result of reduced funding and will have to cut some programs. Highly cost-effective malaria prevention programs are at a high risk of being deprioritized to ensure malaria treatment remains available for people who are already sick. This is concerning because these prevention tools, such as insecticide-treated net campaigns and seasonal malaria chemoprevention, have been a major driver in reducing malaria deaths. How we’re responding: GiveWell is working to identify and fund emerging needs created by the funding shortfalls. This includes an emergency grant to procure three million rapid diagnostic tests for Nigeria and cover a last-minute gap in supplies. We’re also investigating funding for the delivery costs of mosquito nets—costs previously covered by large donors like the Global Fund—to ensure that already-purchased nets reach the people who need them.
GiveWell has a long history of finding and funding highly cost-effective malaria programs. We’re working closely with our partners to understand the complexities of this new funding landscape, prepare for emerging cost-effective needs, and direct funding where our research shows it can have the greatest impact.
Visit our Foreign Aid Funding Cuts webpage to learn more about our response and how you can help, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for the latest updates.
This episode was recorded on July 16, 2025 and represents our best understanding at that time.
More from GiveWell Conversations
In an effort to direct substantially more funding to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find to help people, GiveWell’s research is expanding in two directions at once: going broader, to cover more areas of global health and development, and going deeper, to improve the inputs that inform our decision-making.
GiveWell works to continually improve our research so we can make better grant decisions and direct donations where we believe they can do the most good. GiveWell’s Cross-Cutting research subteam is an important part of that effort—it investigates the impact of the programs we fund, works to resolve our largest uncertainties, and aims to improve our research. As GiveWell’s grantmaking grows, the Cross-Cutting subteam is strengthening our data collection and analysis to support that growth. In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Alex Cohen, who leads the Cross-Cutting subteam, about how better data can improve our decision-making, our work to gather stronger evidence, and the ways we’ve tested AI as a tool to increase our research capacity and quality.
GiveWell, with co-funding from Coefficient Giving, recently made our largest grant to date: $276 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) to support the procurement and distribution of 92 million nets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from 2027 through 2029. We estimate that the nets, 46 million of which we think would not otherwise be distributed, will avert roughly 67,000 deaths. We have supported AMF’s work for more than 15 years, and the insecticide-treated nets it procures and distributes remain one of the most cost-effective ways we've found to save lives.
When GiveWell investigates a new cause area, we’re often focused on two priorities: directing funding where we think it can help people most and generating evidence to inform larger investments later. Family planning is a clear example. Recent foreign aid cuts—including reductions from the US, UK, and Dutch governments—deepened an already substantial need and opened up new cost-effective funding opportunities.
Diarrhea is one of the leading causes of death for children under five, killing more than 400,000 children every year. GiveWell has funded several programs to prevent and treat diarrhea, and we recently expanded our work by making a grant to support the implementation and evaluation of WASHmobile in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan. The program, which was developed by Johns Hopkins University, delivers water treatment supplies and hygiene messaging to households at the highest risk of diarrheal disease. It has shown promising results in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) but hasn’t yet been implemented at scale in the challenging settings where the need is greatest.