Lead Exposure Action Fund

When residents of Flint, Mich., were exposed to toxic levels of lead in their drinking water, 1 in 20 children in the city had elevated blood lead levels, causing health effects that residents still grapple with. Today, there is a lead poisoning crisis raging on a far greater scale — and hardly anyone is talking about it.

Lead poisoning affects 800 million children each year but receives very little global attention and funding. That needs to change, said experts at the United Nations General Assembly — and tackling it won’t break the bank.

[Coefficient Giving’s] interest in launching a broad effort to eliminate lead exposure, alongside other funders, stemmed from learning about an earlier project which checked off all its boxes: addressing an issue that was important, tractable, and neglected, and likely saving a huge number of lives.

Lead remains a key part of modern life — the world’s seventh-most-mined metal. If lead were benign, this would be a story of technological success: ingenuity leading to more and better usages of a mineral we’ve known about for thousands of years. Unfortunately, it is not.

Pure Earth works on addressing pollution in low- and middle- income countries, with a particular focus on lead exposure. This grant covers projects to mitigate lead exposure in over ten different countries or Indian states, and across a range of sources including spices, ceramics, cosmetics, metal cookware, and lead-acid batteries.

Select projects include working with the Indian government to eliminate lead in spices in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the first randomized controlled trial replacing lead-contaminated products in households, and interventions to address contaminated cosmetics and metal cookware in Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal.

The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a global development think tank focused on reducing global poverty by conducting research and developing policy solutions. CGD started working on lead exposure in 2021, supported by a grant from GiveWell.

This grant supports a continuation of CGD’s lead working groups, the development of actionable policy proposals on various aspects of the problem, active engagement with policymakers and funders, public events and media engagements on lead exposure, and a pool of funding for subgrants to build the evidence base for interventions to address lead exposure.

Project Unleaded builds on the success of Drs. Jenna Forsyth and Steve Luby in identifying spices as a key source of lead exposure in Bangladesh. Their work led to a national campaign against lead chromate pigments being added to spices, and reduced blood lead levels by ~30%.

We’re supporting them to scale their work across multiple areas, including blood lead level surveys, identifying sources of lead exposure, assessing spice contamination levels and creating mitigation protocols, studying the impact of a recent spice intervention, looking for ways to address airborne exposure from lead-acid battery recycling, and working to develop portable, low-cost tools for lead testing.

UNICEF houses and provides staff for the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future (PLF), a global initiative created to help health institutions, aid agencies, funders, and country governments collaborate to end childhood lead poisoning.

PLF hosts seminars and conferences, maintains a digital library of materials on lead exposure, and creates shared resources (like a toolkit for building national capacity to address the issue).