GWWC's 2025 evaluations of evaluators

Aidan Whitfield🔸; Giving What We Can🔸

The Giving What We Can research team is excited to share the results of our 2025 round of evaluations of charity evaluators and grantmakers!

In this round, we completed two evaluations that will inform our donation recommendations for the 2025 giving season. As with our previous rounds, there are substantial limitations to these evaluations, but we nevertheless think that they are a significant improvement to a landscape in which there were previously no independent evaluations of evaluators’ work.

In this post, we share the key takeaways from our two 2025 evaluations and link to the full reports. In our conclusion, we explain our plans for future evaluations.

Please also see our website for more context on why and how we evaluate evaluators.

We look forward to your questions and comments! (Note: we will respond when we return from leave on the 8th of December)

Key takeaways from each of our 2025 evaluations

The two evaluators included in our 2025 round of evaluating evaluators were:

GiveWell

Based on our evaluation, we have decided to continue including GiveWell's Top Charities, Top Charities Fund and All Grants Fund in GWWC's list of recommended programmes and to continue allocating a portion of GWWC's Global Health and Wellbeing Fund to GiveWell's All Grants Fund. As GiveWell met our bar in our 2023 evaluation, our task was to determine whether their evaluation quality had been maintained and whether there were significant issues we had previously missed. Our decision is based on two main considerations:

Firstly, we continue to think GiveWell's approach serves a variety of sufficiently plausible worldviews amongst donors who prioritise promoting near-term human health and wellbeing
Secondly, our quality checks on one Top Charity evaluation (Helen Keller Intl's vitamin A supplementation programme) and two marginal grant evaluations (Taimaka's malnutrition treatment and Technical Support Unit grants) imply that GiveWell maintains high evaluation standards, with careful validation of inputs, comprehensive analyses, and effective use of external expertise

We also note GiveWell's progress across all three areas for improvement we identified in our 2023 evaluation — transparency and legibility, forecast reviews, and uncertainty handling — demonstrating their commitment to continuous improvement. Whilst we think there remains room for further improvement, particularly in the legibility of grant evaluations and justification of subjective inputs, we continue to think that GiveWell's reputation for providing high-quality recommendations and grants is justified, and we expect them to maintain their position as a leading source of impact-focused recommendations in global health and wellbeing.

For more information, please see our 2025 evaluation report for GiveWell.

Happier Lives Institute (HLI)

Following our 2025 investigation of the Happier Lives Institute (HLI), we've decided not (yet) to include HLI's recommended charities in our list of recommended charities and funds and do not plan to allocate a portion of GWWC's Global Health and Wellbeing Fund budget to HLI's recommended charities at this point. However, this was an unusually difficult decision, and reasonable people could disagree with our conclusion.

HLI is filling an important gap — identifying opportunities for donors who strongly prioritise life improvements over life-saving benefits. We found much to appreciate:

Their reports are very transparent and comprehensive, with their psychotherapy evaluation receiving a positive independent review from the Unjournal
The researchers we interacted with were thoughtful, open-minded, and genuinely responsive to feedback
They've made impressive contributions: identifying issues in GiveWell's deworming analysis, conducting foundational wellbeing research, and sparking valuable discussions about how philosophical beliefs affect one’s view of charity effectiveness
They've made remarkable progress given their small team and organisational age and we think their recommendations are already worth considering as highly promising donation options

Despite these strengths, we couldn't confidently conclude that HLI's process reliably identifies opportunities at least as cost-effective as GiveWell's for donors with a life-improving focus:

Competitiveness of GiveWell Top Charities: When we adapted HLI's AMF evaluation to use assumptions from their recent Taimaka evaluation, AMF's cost-effectiveness increased substantially — with a (highly uncertain) point estimate comparable to HLI's Top Charity recommendations. This used only HLI's own assumptions, suggesting GiveWell Top Charities may be reasonably competitive under HLI's worldview.
Implementation evidence: We have concerns about how HLI weighs charity-specific evidence for psychotherapy programmes, particularly given Friendship Bench's low attendance rates and M&E results indicating substantially smaller effects than meta-analytic estimates.
Process maturity: Some evaluation processes would benefit from further development — including clearer recommendation criteria and more consistent assumptions across evaluations.

We emphasise: our conclusion is consistent with HLI's charities being highly cost-effective and potentially even more cost-effective than GiveWell Top Charities by HLI’s worldview. Our concern is about process reliability, not individual charity quality. We'll continue considering HLI's recommendations for our 'other supported programmes', and we believe their recommendations are worth consideration by donors — particularly those with strong life-improving preferences.

We're optimistic about HLI's trajectory and look forward to re-evaluating them in a future round of evaluating evaluators.

For more information, please see our 2025 evaluation report for HLI.

Conclusion and future plans

We have created a webpage for those interested in learning more about our 2025 iteration of evaluating evaluators.

We plan to continue to evaluate evaluators – extending the list beyond those we’ve covered across our first three rounds, improving our methodology, and reinvestigating evaluators we’ve previously looked into to see how their approach/work has or has not changed.

Among our next priorities will be to re-evaluate Longview’s Emerging Challenges Fund and EA Funds’ Long-Term Future Fund in our reducing catastrophic risks cause area and EA Funds’ Animal Welfare Fund in our animal welfare cause area — as we last evaluated these evaluators in 2023.

Happier Lives InstituteDec 1*77

We’d like to thank Aidan and the Giving What We Can (GWWC) team for a careful, constructive, and genuinely collaborative evaluation. They were open with their reasoning, generous with their time, and responsive throughout.

We naturally appreciate the positive things they highlighted: the transparency and rigour of our work, the promise of our recommended charities for donors with strong life-improving preferences, and our contribution to foundational wellbeing research and to the broader ecosystem.

GWWC described the decision to “not (yet)” rely on our recommendations as “unusually difficult” and “a close call,” with reasonable disagreement among their evaluators. We take this as a sign that our work is being taken seriously; we aim to make it an unusually easy call for GWWC next time.

1) Why we’re not surprised or discouraged by the evaluation results

For the purposes of GWWC’s assessment, the charity evaluator they are considering relying on needs to be reasonably competitive with the existing field leader in their cause area. In our case, as we fall under the “global health and wellbeing” category, this means HLI was directly compared to GiveWell on the cost-effectiveness of its charity recommendations and on process reliability. This is a high hurdle to pass. For context, sometimes people are surprised to hear that:

Our budget is about 5% of GiveWell’s (under $1m vs over $20m)
Our research staff is ~3 FTE compared to around 50.
We’ve only been making charity recommendations since 2022, whereas GiveWell has been doing so since 2008.

In addition, HLI has a dual mandate. While we place a high value on charity recommendations, we also work to pioneer wellbeing impact methodology and conduct a range of applied and theoretical work outside direct charity evaluation.

Given this, we aren’t necessarily surprised that GWWC describes our processes as immature, given the comparison. In fact, we did better than we expected – and for this reason, we feel energised and encouraged to do and become better.

2) How we’re planning to improve our research

Many improvements GWWC proposed were already on our roadmap; their evaluation is a welcome push to do more on these issues. Some examples of things we plan to work on include:

Applying consistent assumptions across evaluations (e.g., revisiting AMF using Taimaka-style assumptions, forming a view on time-discounting, and reviewing our income to wellbeing conversion rate)
Developing a structured “charity quality” rubric that captures things like implementation strength, monitoring and evaluation practices, organisational responsiveness.
Striving for even greater transparency, including publishing code, all relevant spreadsheets and articulating a clearer “bar” for recommendations

3) The challenges to understanding AMF’s life-improving effects

A major part of GWWC’s analysis involved applying the assumptions from our 2024 Taimaka evaluation to our 2022 AMF model. Under those revised assumptions, the life-improving benefits of AMF increase substantially, resulting in a (highly uncertain) cost-effectiveness estimate for AMF in the same ballpark as HLI’s top recommendations.

We appreciated GWWC drawing attention to inconsistencies across our analyses. We agree these should be resolved and plan to revisit AMF more systematically. However, we think it is too early to conclude that AMF has large life-improving benefits. Three evidentiary challenges make us cautious:

Limited and low-relevance evidence. There is no published direct subjective wellbeing evidence on the long-run effects of early-life malaria exposure. Instead, both HLI and GiveWell rely on just two income-based studies from the mid-20th century, DDT-based malaria eradication campaigns in the USA and India (Bleakley 2010, Cutler et al., 2010). These show small, long-lasting income increases of roughly ~2% per year of malaria averted before adjustments. These are quite different contexts from modern bednet distribution and malaria prevention in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mechanistic mismatch. These historical studies require us to convert small, diffuse, long-term income changes into WELLBYs. But this also poses issues given that cash transfers, our best evidence for income → wellbeing, involve large, relatively concentrated, highly salient income changes (10–100% increases). In contrast, malaria-reduction income gains are small, spread out, and unlikely to be psychologically salient. Because of this difference, it’s unclear to us whether a 1% income increase for 40 years should produce the same wellbeing benefit as a 40% increase for one year.
The case of deworming. In our analysis of deworming, we found that small long-run income effects do not correspond to detectable long-run wellbeing effects. This tempers our expectations against assuming that very small, long-run income changes reliably translate into meaningful improvements in wellbeing in other cases.

Given these issues, we think comparisons between AMF and our top charities - which treat depression via therapy and have large amounts of relevant, direct wellbeing data - remain “apples to oranges” until stronger, more relevant data become available. That said, we plan to revisit our AMF analysis, harmonise assumptions, re-examine the income-to-WELLBY relationship, and explore opportunities for generating direct wellbeing evidence on malaria. But we think it’s quite plausible that, in the long run, the case for the life-improving effects of malaria reduction will remain speculative until and unless more direct wellbeing evidence becomes available.

4) Closing thoughts

Overall, we appreciate the serious thought and care that went into GWWC’s evaluation. We agree with many of their points, have constructive disagreements on others, and are grateful for the clear, actionable feedback. This evaluation is an important milestone in our growth, and we look forward to strengthening our research, improving our processes, and continuing to build a world where evidence-based decision-making takes happiness seriously.

— The Happier Lives Institute

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