How We’re Searching for the Best Ways to Help in 2026

This post was originally published on the GiveWell blog. You can view the original version here.

This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the next few years. The second is to grant at least $500 million to the best opportunities we can find this year to save and improve lives.

Over the past several years, GiveWell has doubled the size of our research team to deepen and broaden our search for highly impactful programs. Our 60 researchers are now distributed among 11 subteams that cover a number of global health and development cause areas, as well as core research needs.

Below you’ll find a summary of the key approaches each subteam is using this year to find new opportunities to help people in need as much as we can.

Malaria

People: Marinella Capriati, Zoe Hartman

Malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when people are bitten by infected mosquitoes, is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of the approximately 600,000 malaria deaths worldwide each year.^[1] While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team are allowing us to take on this challenge now in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago. Our malaria research subteam, with 15 people, is the largest of our research teams and is divided into three subteams.

Antimalarial Medicines

People: Sarah Tougher, Robin Dey, Sam Aman

The Antimalarial Medicines subteam focuses on medicines that either prevent or treat infections from malaria parasites. Prevention and treatment are managed as an integrated portfolio because they use the same products, and programming and policy decisions in one area have direct implications for the other. For example, decisions about which antimalarial to use in one intervention may have potential implications for drug resistance in another. In 2026, the team plans to focus on the following:

• Streamlining research on Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program.This is one of our Top Charities, which are highly cost-effective programs that we know well. As a result, we only plan to focus on a small number of high-value questions in our upcoming investigations. By doing so, we hope to reserve capacity for expansion in other areas.
• Looking for cost-effective opportunities to diversify our SMC portfolio. We plan to continue to work with Malaria Consortium for the majority of SMC programming we support, while exploring opportunities to expand coverage and learn more about the relative strengths and weaknesses of different partners.
• Identifying promising chemoprevention approaches outside the Sahel. The team recently launched a request for proposals that will likely include pilots of perennial malaria chemoprevention, post-malaria discharge, and intermittent preventive treatment in school-aged children as well as strategies to optimize the delivery of SMC.
• Finding cost-effective ways to support malaria treatment. Prior to changes to the global funding landscape last year, we had believed that cost-effective opportunities to support malaria case management were largely covered by existing funding streams. Since that time, we have identified and funded existing gaps to support case management, and we will continue to look for cost-effective opportunities to bolster access to treatment.

Malaria Vector Control

People: Alex Bowles, Jenna Amlani, Rosie Bettle, Sarah Eustis-Guthrie, Nat Puapattanakajorn

The Malaria Vector Control subteam researches and funds cost-effective programs that prevent malaria infections and deaths by targeting the mosquitoes that transmit the disease. To date, most of the subteam’s work has supported the procurement and distribution of insecticide-treated nets through campaigns. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Looking for large potential gaps in insecticide-treated net coverage in areas with high malaria burden. We are focusing on potential cost-effective nets campaigns in high-burden areas, where we believe that aid cuts may have increased existing gaps. We will continue to work with Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s Top Charities, while considering additional implementers, such as Malaria Consortium, whom we have funded to support net campaigns in parts of Nigeria.
• Identifying promising vector control approaches beyond net campaigns that could eventually absorb significant funding. We plan to investigate routine net distribution, spatial repellents, and potentially insecticide-treated baby wraps. While we do not expect these efforts to result in large grants this year, we may scale support for cost-effective programs in the future.
• Conducting assessments of the organizational capabilities of our key implementing partners. This includes Malaria Consortium and Against Malaria Foundation. We will also review our approach to grant investigations to ensure efficient and effective processes. As we ramp up our annual grantmaking, we are looking for ways to streamline our research while maintaining our rigor.

Malaria Cross-Cutting Research

People: John Macke, James Watson, Kartik Sharma, Lucy McNamara, Giselle Gray

The Malaria Cross-Cutting Research subteam aims to improve GiveWell’s malaria grantmaking by asking high-level research questions, particularly focusing on ways that our current approach may be wrong and other strategies we could try. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Soliciting high-quality research and pilot opportunities across malaria that we wouldn’t be able to find through normal grantmaking channels. We have launched a request for proposals looking for cost-effective opportunities in vector control, antimalarial medicines, and cross-cutting malaria research.
• Looking for promising malaria interventions beyond nets and SMC. We will explore a number of opportunities, such as a malaria rebound study and market shaping for rapid diagnostic tests. We will also conduct quick evidence assessments on interventions we are less familiar with and work with the CHAI Incubator to develop new opportunities.
• Seeking to improve the accuracy of our cost-effectiveness estimates for nets and SMC. Because most of our significant modeling insights in the past emerged from new perspectives rather than refinements to specific parameters, we will focus this year on sourcing outside perspectives and alternative strategies for addressing our uncertainties.
• Working to articulate and defend the key premises behind our malaria grantmaking in a way that invites external feedback. We aim to publish three reports on important uncertainties or big-picture questions, such as why malaria hasn’t declined despite more than $1 billion in GiveWell funding for malaria prevention.

Nutrition

People: Alice Redfern, Andrew Martin, Catherine Hollander, Jack Clift, Jordan Hebert, Madison Stieg, Stephan Guyenet, Zach McLeod

Nutritional deficiencies are common in low- and middle-income countries and can cause a variety of symptoms, including increased susceptibility to infection and death. The Nutrition subteam researches and funds cost-effective programs to address problems like vitamin A deficiency, anemia, and acute malnutrition. We expect that up to half of the team’s grantmaking in 2026 will be renewal grants; the rest will be new grantmaking in areas where we are in the process of developing program pipelines. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Considering opportunities to expand vitamin A supplementation (VAS). VAS programs in most countries where it is cost-effective (because of high vitamin A deficiency and child mortality rates) are already funded by us or other donors. We plan to explore remaining promising locations to determine whether to expand or shift to steady-state renewals of existing cost-effective programs. We’re also exploring ways to improve our estimates of VAS impact through surveys or a new trial.
• Looking for cost-effective opportunities to reduce the burden of anemia in Africa. We currently fund programs in India that provide iron supplements or fortify staple foods with iron. While Africa also has a high anemia burden, we are concerned that supplementation could be less effective because of higher baseline inflammation in the region or could worsen malaria infections. We’re completing research to address these concerns and determine whether to seek opportunities in Africa or expand support in South Asia. After receiving results related to iron bioavailability, we will consider grantmaking for multiple micronutrient supplementation.
• Pursuing ways to reduce the cost of acute malnutrition treatment without compromising effectiveness. While there is a very large unmet need for malnutrition treatment, most programs we have identified fall below our cost-effectiveness threshold. We plan to conduct a listening tour with implementers and other funders to identify promising approaches for reducing costs and expect to fund some pilot grants to test them.
• Exploring opportunities in other areas, such as cardiovascular disease prevention. Given capacity constraints, we’re taking a light-touch approach to pursuing these opportunities, such as following existing leads and outsourcing scoping work. We see this work as building a pipeline for grantmaking in future years.

Vaccination

People: Natalie Crispin, Isabel Vasquez, Sarah Carson, Vicky Yu

Vaccines are very effective at preventing deadly diseases and they receive substantial global funding. Because of this, in most low- and middle-income countries the vaccines children need are available, yet not all children receive them. We currently have one Top Charity, New Incentives, focused on providing caregiver incentives and a growing portfolio of grants supporting programs that provide vaccination outreach to remote communities. We expect to use what we learn from the operational and impact data generated by those programs to improve our grantmaking and identify opportunities where additional funding can meaningfully increase vaccination rates and save lives. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Supporting vaccination outreach programs to reach the lowest coverage communities. Our 2025 request for proposals confirmed that there are organizations ready to implement large-scale programs to send vaccinators to difficult-to-reach communities, and we made grants to start five new programs in five countries. In 2026, we have run a new request for proposals and plan to make at least as many grants to outreach programs in 2026 as we did in 2025. We’ll assess the impact of these programs through independent third-party coverage surveys.
• Looking for cost-effective vaccination programs that provide caregiver incentives. New Incentives, a GiveWell Top Charity, has shown that small cash incentives for caregivers can meaningfully increase coverage. We would like to expand to additional implementers, so we plan to launch a request for information seeking pilot programs that could iterate on operational design and build implementer experience.
• Exploring support for malaria vaccines and other vaccination opportunities. We also expect to explore whether there are cost-effective opportunities to support the rollout of malaria vaccines and, if capacity allows, to pursue some other early-stage ideas, such as addressing supply chain gaps and research and development on improved technology for vaccine delivery.

Water

People: Erin Crossett, Karin Mason, Megan Morris

More than a billion people around the world lack access to uncontaminated drinking water, and according to the World Health Organization, more than 500,000 people die each year from diseases caused by contaminated water.^[2] This year, we expect to pivot from a narrow focus on chlorination to explore alternative treatment technologies and delivery models. This means accepting higher uncertainty in exchange for the potential to unlock high-impact opportunities that need substantial amounts of funding. Our strategy is intentionally fluid; we’re prioritizing rapid learning through quick evidence assessments and expert consultations. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Looking for promising alternative water treatment technologies or delivery models. We’re investigating alternatives such as inline ultraviolet light purification, filtration, and direct delivery of clean water (often called water kiosks). While we expect to continue to fund chlorination programs, we plan to invest more time searching for other promising areas. Depending on what we find, we may run another request for information to identify implementers for a given intervention area.
• Partnering with multilateral development banks to add water quality treatments onto existing infrastructure projects. The goal of this strategic partnership is to determine if we can include water quality treatment as part of existing or planned large-scale piped water infrastructure projects. If this works, it could be a very large funding channel.
• Investing in measurement and market shaping. We’re supporting “enablers” of impact. For example, we plan to fund programs to improve chemical contamination testing strips and to use prizes to incentivize the development of low-cost, accurate chlorine sensors, which could potentially increase the cost-effectiveness of our in-line chlorination portfolio.
• Seeking new funding mechanisms. We will look for new ways to move money that set us up well for future years by building out our early-stage pipeline. We’re exploring regranting opportunities and establishing a water program incubator to scope and pilot new interventions.
• Improving adherence and cost-effectiveness of chlorination grants. Chlorination still seems intuitively promising—it’s cheap, widely available, averts mortality, and neglected relative to water access—but we received significant negative updates on adherence from external coverage surveys of Evidence Action’s water quality programs in Uganda and Malawi. Our chlorine pilots are ongoing, with results expected in 2027. If results from external monitoring and evaluation of these programs are promising, there could be sizable cost-effective opportunities to expand.

Livelihoods

People: Adam Salisbury

In late 2025, we began to focus more attention on programs that increase the economic well-being of people in extreme poverty. Our goal for the next two years is to test the hypothesis that GiveWell ought to expand its portfolio of livelihoods grants. We’re planning to cover a lot of ground in 2026, prioritizing program areas that could unlock significant funding opportunities if the general case for philanthropic investment seems promising. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Evaluating the broader economic effects of cash transfers. Cash transfers entail giving cash support to households in extreme poverty to help them meet their basic needs. In low-income countries, there’s robust evidence that these programs improve food consumption and housing quality, and more recent evidence suggests they can also benefit the local economy.^[3] We will assess how those effects, including effects on prices and wages, relate to the optimal size, frequency, and saturation of cash transfers across different implementation contexts.
• Generating evidence on and seeking to support the expansion of cost-effective ultra-poor graduation programs. Ultra-poor graduation programs typically deliver a bundled intervention of productive assets, training, a short-term cash stipend, and access to savings vehicles with the aim of creating a sustainable path out of poverty. RCT evidence shows that the programs, while expensive, improve short-run consumption and that the gains persist after the intervention ends.^[4] We’re interested in whether we can generate evidence on and support the scale-up of newer, more cost-effective variants.
• Assessing whether new ways to deliver or target microfinance programs are cost-effective. RCTs of microfinance programs in the 2000s showed only small average effects on business profits and income. However, recent evidence suggests more promising results from newer programs, such as those earmarked for productive assets. We plan to investigate the possibility of generating additional evidence and explore whether philanthropic funding for microfinance programs is viable.

New Areas

People: Dan Brown, Daniel Issing, Dilhan Perera, Kim Vidal, Meika Ball, Rachel Mitchell

The New Areas subteam researches and funds cost-effective programs in global health and development that fall outside the scope of the other research subteams, such as diarrhea treatment and screening, and treatment for tuberculosis or syphilis. This year, the subteam aims to increase its grantmaking by about 20% over 2025 while broadening the cause areas and types of intervention that GiveWell funds. To accomplish this, we will be intentionally accepting higher levels of risk and uncertainty. We believe doing so will reduce the chance of missing highly cost-effective programs that need significant future funding and will provide additional opportunities to learn. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Expanding support for cause areas we’ve identified as promising. We will look for additional highly cost-effective opportunities to support programs in areas we have already identified as core to our work, such as HIV treatment, family planning, and health systems strengthening. In each of those areas, we see promising fundamentals: a range of potentially highly cost-effective programs, strong implementers, and significant funding gaps exacerbated by global funding uncertainties. We also will consider renewing and scaling programs in other areas we’ve previously funded, such as oral rehydration solution and zinc to treat diarrhea.
• Searching for highly cost-effective programs in cause areas GiveWell hasn’t previously funded much or at all. We’re spending significantly more time on emerging cause areas in 2026 compared to 2025. This could include medical oxygen, tuberculosis, AI applications to global health, drug quality, and noncommunicable diseases including hypertension.
• Considering additional grant and partnership types. We’re exploring funding mechanisms that are less familiar to GiveWell, such as contributing to pooled funding and supporting market shaping instruments. We’ll also consider partnering with additional organizations to develop incubators to diversify and strengthen our pipeline of new programs.

Cross-Cutting Research

People: Alex Cohen, Brendan Phillips, Brian Gill, Jane Fortson, Katie Skoff, Mark Walsh, Steven Brownstone

The Cross-Cutting team supports research quality across GiveWell. As the organization scales this year—making more grants to more programs—we’re working to maintain the quality of our work and respond to important research questions that apply across our grantmaking. The team plans to focus on the following:

• Hiring and training new researchers. GiveWell plans to substantially increase the number of people on its research team in 2026. Our top priority for the year is leading training to ensure new hires meet high standards and become productive quickly. Everything else GiveWell intends to accomplish depends on having enough well-trained people.
• Conducting grant lookbacks. Our growing research capacity has recently enabled us to expand this step in our research process and publish comprehensive evaluations for select grants. Through this work, we aim to advance our understanding of the true impact of our funding, transparently share what we learn, and continue improving the cost-effectiveness of donations.
• Gathering local insights in Nigeria. We are currently running four pilots in Nigeria to pressure-test our desk research with local insights that can validate or challenge our research. In 2026, we’ll analyze these pilots and decide what to continue supporting. If the Nigeria work proves useful, we may expand our local insights work to DRC.
• Supporting monitoring and evaluation efforts. In 2025, we pressure-tested our monitoring and evaluation efforts to identify gaps in our work for our top six grantmaking areas, including our four Top Charities, water quality interventions, and malnutrition treatment programs. In 2026, we’ll take steps to ensure that the top recommendations from that red teaming work are implemented.
• Exploring the use of AI tools. We’re rolling out AI tools for common use cases, such as conducting critical literature reviews, and enabling research team members to use AI for their own use cases. We’re also systematically tracking how well AI does at our work. Our goal is to identify concrete ways we can use AI to make our work more efficient and prepare for future jumps in AI capability.

Research Support and Operations

Two of our research subteams are devoted to supporting the smooth running of the research team as a whole. Our Research Operations subteam provides logistical and knowledge management support. Our Commons team vets research materials and provides other research support as needed.

Research Operations

People: Hannah Bell, Destiny Clark, Kaitlynn Lagman, Matt Wang

The Research Operations subteam provides support for team tools and processes, including forecasting, project tracking infrastructure, international travel, external feedback on our grant processes, and internal coordination. The subteam plans to focus on maintaining and improving research team processes and resources to accompany research team growth, including:

• Hiring and onboarding additional project managers for the research team
• Collecting, organizing, and analyzing detailed grantmaking data
• Iterating on grantmaking and research processes, with an eye toward smoothing processes at a larger scale
• Improving communication and coordination between GiveWell and external partners
• Strengthening internal knowledge management, including grants management

Commons

People: Nicole Zok, Kameron Smith, Ally Rome, Andrew Ligon, Annie Barnett, Beatrix Swanson, Brooke Reaves, Gurmukh Singh, Jack Shangraw, Meghna Ray, Peter Namie, Sophia Emmons-Bell

The Commons subteam supports grantmaking volume, quality, and transparency across GiveWell by vetting research materials, including grant pages and cost-effectiveness models, and by providing other research support. This year, the subteam will focus on:

• Hiring and onboarding additional research analysts
• Coordinating with other research subteams to unearth and prioritize high-impact opportunities for research support
• Vetting cost-effectiveness models for larger grants earlier in the grant investigation process
• Addressing the backlog of grant pages that have not yet been published
• Experimenting with AI to improve the efficiency and quality of vetting

Notes

1. ^{^}

   See the WHO fact sheet on malaria, which states “Globally in 2024, there were an estimated 282 million malaria cases and 610 000 malaria deaths in 80 countries…the WHO African Region was home to 95% of malaria cases (265 million) and 95% (579,000) of malaria deaths. Children under 5 accounted for about 75% of all malaria deaths in the Region.” 75% * 95% = 71%.

2. ^{^}

   See the WHO fact sheet on drinking water, which states “Microbiologically contaminated drinking water can transmit diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid and polio and is estimated to cause approximately 505 000 diarrhoeal deaths each year.”

3. ^{^}

   See more on cash transfers in our GiveDirectly Cash for Poverty Relief intervention report here.

^{^}

See key evidence for ultra-poor graduation programs in Banerjee et al. 2021 and Banerjee et al. 2015.

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