This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
This post was originally published on the GiveWell blog. You can view the original version here.
In our 2025 grantmaking year, GiveWell approved $418 million in grants to highly cost-effective programs in order to save and improve lives as much as we can. Through years of deliberate groundwork, we’ve been growing our research capacity and scope in order to direct substantially more funding to the most impactful opportunities we can find. Last year’s grantmaking reflects this growth, and we will be continuing an intensive effort this year to scale our ability to partner with donors to help people in need.
Between February 1, 2025, and January 31, 2026, GiveWell approved 131 grants to 69 organizations—the most grants we’ve made in a year so far. This post provides an overview of the kinds of grants we made and the impact we had last year. This was only possible thanks to the generosity of our donors. We’re incredibly grateful for the trust you place in our research and for your partnership in trying to do the most good we can together.
Increased Grantmaking
In 2025, we launched more than 200 formal grant investigations, after reviewing many additional promising opportunities. Tens of thousands of hours went into this research, which resulted in 131 approved grants. This is more than double the number of grants we approved during 2024, and resulted in a year-over-year increase of more than 20% in total grantmaking dollars.
Double Our Cost-Effectiveness Threshold
In 2025, we generally considered funding opportunities that our research estimated to be at least 8x our cost-effectiveness benchmark. Overall, we estimate that the average cost-effectiveness of the money spent across all our grants was approximately double that: 16x our benchmark.
You can see a more detailed breakdown of our grant dollars by cost-effectiveness in the figure below, which excludes some smaller grants for which we did not create a formal cost-effectiveness estimate.
Expanded Cause Areas and Reach
While GiveWell is often known for its Top Charities, we’ve been substantially broadening our work over the last several years as part of our mission to help people in need as much as we can. Of our total 2025 grant funding, $309 million was allocated to highly cost-effective programs other than our Top Charities. As this shift shows, our growing research team is increasingly able to find a wider variety of highly impactful programs and cause areas to support.
Malaria prevention and treatment was the largest area of our grantmaking over the last year, and we directed substantial funding to a growing number of other global health and development areas as well. You can see a full list of our 2025 grants on our website.
GiveWell grants in 2025 supported programs in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The largest number of grants supported programs in Nigeria, followed by India and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Urgent Response to Aid Cuts
Twenty-five grants, totaling about $53 million (13%) of grantmaking funds, directly addressed urgent and cost-effective needs created by cuts to US foreign aid, though most of our research and the programs we fund have been affected by the cuts in some way.
In order to have the greatest impact with our donors’ funds, we are focusing our response to foreign aid funding cuts on the most cost-effective opportunities we find, rather than trying to replace lost funding more generally. The grants we’ve approved used a wide variety of approaches, including direct program support, advisory support for governments, purchasing health supplies, and funding guarantees for programs that were not certain expected payments would come through. Most of this funding went to support malaria prevention and treatment, but it also covered needs we discovered in many other cause areas.
Continuing Our Growth in 2026 and Beyond
As our 2025 grantmaking demonstrates, we’re finding and funding a growing number and wider range of high-impact ways to help people—expanding our ability to support donors in giving effectively.
In 2026, we plan to continue strengthening our team, systems, and processes to enable us to help people in need even more. Our top priorities this year are to:
Grant $500 million or more to cost-effective programs. We grew our team substantially last year, and we expect this additional capacity to enable us to direct more money cost-effectively.
Build capacity to sustain increased fundraising and grantmaking. We need to keep strengthening our team and growing our capacity to research and fund more highly cost-effective ways to help in the future.
We’re grateful for the tens of thousands of donors whose generosity allowed us to direct funding to highly cost-effective programs this year to save and improve lives. Our researchers are already hard at work on our 2026 grants to help people in need!
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How We’re Searching for the Best Ways to Help in 2026
Good job presenting this in such a clear and concise manner. Thank you for all the great work you are doing!