Seven months ago, we committed $175 million for 2026 to GiveWell’s recommendations, which we think represent the gold standard for evidence-backed, cost-effective global health giving. In partnership with Good Ventures, the foundation of Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, we’re now increasing that commitment to $1 billion for 2026.
This $1 billion will nearly double the cumulative funding we have previously committed to GiveWell’s recommendations over the last decade. Based on GiveWell’s estimates, we believe that funding has saved over 100,000 lives.
This substantial increase is a one-off surge rather than a new steady state, driven most notably by our growing expectations of future giving from Good Ventures and other funders. While the future is uncertain, we currently expect the coming years to see significant increases in philanthropic funding for the kinds of programs GiveWell recommends. As a result, we and Good Ventures are accelerating spending now, both to fill cost-effective gaps today and to create scalable opportunities for future donors. Future funding is far from guaranteed; this is a bet on laying the groundwork for others to emerge and pick up the baton.
The rest of this post:
- Shares examples of recent GiveWell recommendations we’ve funded
- Elaborates on why we’re accelerating our giving overall
- Explains why we’re increasing our giving to GiveWell’s recommendations in particular
- Concludes with what we think this means for other GiveWell funders
Where our funding to GiveWell’s recommendations go
A few recent examples of our funding to GiveWell’s recommendations are below.
- $6.1 million to the Clinton Health Access Initiative to conduct targeted vaccination outreach in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, sending vaccination teams to communities where children have received few or no routine immunizations. DRC has one of the world’s largest populations of “zero-dose” children — those who have never received a single vaccine — and the program brings vaccines to families rather than relying on caregivers to reach distant clinics.
- $10.2 million to Fortify Health to expand open-market wheat flour fortification in India, adding iron to everyday flour supplies to reduce iron-deficiency anemia. GiveWell estimates the program will reach roughly 30 million people a year, at about $0.17 per person, easing a condition that depletes energy, complicates pregnancy, and impairs development.
- $6.3 million to Helen Keller International to deliver azithromycin to infants in Burkina Faso, layering biannual doses of the antibiotic onto existing child health campaigns that already distribute vitamin A. Mass administration of azithromycin reduced child mortality by roughly 14% in a large randomized trial, and delivering it alongside established campaigns keeps costs low.
Why we and Good Ventures are accelerating our giving overall
The most important factor here is that we expect more funding to be available in the future, both from Good Ventures and from other sources. That pushes us to spend faster today, for two reasons:
- Our modeling generally suggests that global health and development funders have the most impact when they smooth effective funding over time, so the most cost-effective opportunities each year get filled. Now that we expect considerably more future funding for this kind of work, we want to pull flexible funding forward to save more lives now when the cost of doing so is lower than it will be once more funders are giving to similar programs.
- Scaling takes time: grantees need to make more ambitious plans, hire new staff, expand into new regions, and so on. By accelerating our spending today, we hope to help outstanding grantees grow enough to effectively absorb much higher amounts of future giving.
Our expectations have shifted a lot in just a few months because much of the future funding we’re anticipating depends on the valuations of some extremely volatile assets. That volatility cuts both ways: it gives us good reason to accelerate spending today, but it also makes the optimal path of future spending very hard to predict. It’s quite possible that the future funding we’re basing this decision on won’t materialize.
As part of ambitiously scaling our global health and wellbeing (GHW) portfolio, we are lowering our GHW cost-effectiveness funding bar from ~2,000x to ~1,000x (i.e. every dollar we spend needs to create as much value as giving $1,000 to someone earning $50,000 per year, or, for health interventions, saving a year of healthy life for $100). That returns the bar to its 2022-23 level.
A secondary factor leading us and Good Ventures to spend faster today is the continued rapid advance in AI capabilities, which we think may be transformative in the coming years. That’s why we’re continuing to rapidly scale our work focused on navigating transformative AI. Alexander and Otis do not have the same timelines and the implications for our GHW work are more nuanced, but we and Good Ventures generally expect that transformative AI, if navigated safely, could make the world as a whole massively richer and reduce the need for global health and development giving in the future. So both a higher credence in the possibility of transformative AI and shorter estimated timelines push us to spend down a fixed pot of GHW funding faster today. At the same time, we’re also doing more work within GHW to explore the potential implications of transformative AI for that portfolio, such as our new RFP on the topic.
A third factor is that, as we’ve noted before, Good Ventures has long preferred to spend faster, and expecting more future funding has led us to defer more to that preference.
Why we’re increasing our commitment to GiveWell’s recommendations in particular
There are several reasons we decided to increase our commitment to GiveWell recommendations specifically, in the context of trying to accelerate our spending overall.
First, and most importantly, we think this level of funding will move toward equalizing our funding bar and GiveWell’s. That’s important because otherwise we would be leaving impact on the table (i.e., if our bars differed, we could have more impact for “free” just by shifting money toward the funding opportunities with the higher bar), which would be inconsistent with our mission of helping others as much as we can. As noted above, we’re lowering our GHW bar in our units from 2,000x to 1,000x as part of scaling. Based on the math we described in December, we think that 1,000x in our units roughly translates to 4.5x in GiveWell’s units. GiveWell has already lowered their bar (in their units) from 8x to 6x earlier this year. We will continue to monitor their bar and ours. It’s possible GiveWell may lower their bar with additional funding in the future, and if they don’t, we will think about raising ours or reallocating them more funding from our other GHW work.
Given the big jump in expected future funding, and its volatility, it’s hard to know how either bar will need to evolve in the coming years. That in turn increases the chances of a larger wedge emerging between GiveWell’s bar and ours, which could make us either a far more substantial or far less substantial funder of GiveWell’s recommendations in the future. (As we’ve explained before, we see GiveWell’s returns curve as flatter than ours, so our funding for their recommendations is more sensitive to changes in our bar than our funding for other opportunities is. We think their curve is flatter than ours in part because of their larger stable of other funders and partly because of the types of projects they tend to support.)
Second, as in past years, supporting GiveWell’s recommendations is a relatively easy and effective way for us to rapidly scale our giving. Delegating a big chunk of our target spending to a trusted external partner lets us scale ambitiously with minimal administrative overhead (though GiveWell will of course need to grapple with the increased scale). That matters a lot to us given the speed and scale we’re now targeting across the board. GiveWell’s recommendations are also more intrinsically scalable than much of the rest of our GHW portfolio: a lot of their work supports direct delivery of health programs, which scales more readily than the advocacy or scientific research we fund elsewhere.
Finally, GiveWell’s work continues to have stronger feedback loops than many other areas we fund, and Alexander also sees GiveWell’s grants, which are largely safer and more evidence-backed direct-service grants compared to our riskier hits-based policy and research grants, as a modestly valuable additional form of worldview diversification. Otis, in contrast, thinks these factors are already captured by the bar considerations above.
We will continue to include the grants that GiveWell recommends out of this allocation on our Global Health and Wellbeing Opportunities Fund page.
What this means for other funders
GiveWell is aiming to scale ambitiously to allocate this and other anticipated funding in the coming years. That means that the marginal cost-effectiveness of GiveWell-directed funding will be lower than it has been in the past couple of years (which has already shown up to some extent in GiveWell’s decision to lower their bar from 8x to 6x). Some funders might be put off by that and want to allocate their funding elsewhere instead. Some degree of that reaction is perfectly rational, but we think it would be a mistake to over-index on it.
Our view is that more funding for GiveWell is remarkably good news for the world: we expect millions more kids will get routine vaccines, sleep under bednets that protect them from malaria, and avoid Vitamin A deficiency. Tens of thousands more will survive to age 5 than otherwise would have.
And we think the case for giving to GiveWell’s recommendations now rather than waiting a year remains strong: giving now helps GiveWell and its recommended programs build capacity that looks more sorely needed for the future. That logic is what led Coefficient and Good Ventures to accelerate our funding here. And to the extent that donors are on the margin of choosing between GiveWell and other work in our global health and wellbeing focus areas, we don’t think this news should push in either direction (since we’re continuing to broadly aim to equalize marginal returns between GiveWell recommendations and our other work).
More broadly, by accelerating spending across the board, we’re betting that other funders will pick up the baton for future giving. We hope you do! And if you’re giving at a large scale in our focus areas, we’d love to hear about it and see how we can help.