Show Notes
GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question?
In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about why GiveWell is dedicating more capacity to researching livelihoods programs that aim to increase people's incomes. They discuss how we're building on existing work, searching for new cost-effective opportunities, and exploring more of the impactful programs we've long cared about.
Elie and Julie discuss: A new funding threshold: GiveWell uses a framework of “moral weights” to compare different outcomes across interventions, but they are a necessary tool and not an absolute truth. To account for this, we’re using a different cost-effectiveness threshold for our expanded livelihoods portfolio. This enables us to evaluate and fund programs that would appear as cost-effective as our standard recommendations to a donor who values income gains twice as much as our standard model. How we’re expanding our livelihoods work: GiveWell is hiring a dedicated Livelihoods Program Officer to lead a more focused search for impactful livelihoods programs. This increased capacity will allow us to develop a long-term livelihoods strategy, build an expert network, and collaborate directly with implementing organizations to find and co-create promising programs. Some areas we plan to explore more deeply: Promising areas for investigation include programs that create positive economic “spillover” benefits for entire communities and community-driven development projects. We’ll also analyze results from our previously funded research on interventions like footbridges and eyeglasses to understand the potential impact these programs could have if scaled.
Our new program officer will lead the search for livelihoods opportunities over the next year that meet our high bar for funding, and we plan to keep growing this research if it proves successful. We’re excited that this expansion of our research team will allow us to explore more of the impactful opportunities that we—and our donors—have long cared about.
Visit our All Grants Fund webpage to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for our latest updates. This episode was recorded on June 25, 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.