Great post, thanks for writing it (and appreciate the shout outs for Ultra/our Mid-stage Global Health Fund).
One way to frame this is as an opportunity for all non-cG GiveWell donors to give to these other parts of the scaffolding this year. Given that cG's grant covers the majority or all of GiveWell's expected grantmaking in 2026, this frees up other donors to redirect funding, and then they can always return to the bigger GiveWell next year if it needs more regranting funds.
Even the anticipation of the third wave is a great opportunity to think about how development could be better.
What resonates to me from your post is the importance of supporting many organizations to innovate and flourish vs. a huge rush of money creating a monopoly on impact for a few. I’m hoping that we see more ways that high performance gets rewarded, which is not the norm in development from our experience.
It sounds simple, but doing a better job doesn’t necessarily get you more work as often as it should. The upside of achieving this isn’t just that more money goes to high performers, but it also creates a work culture that promotes individual growth and appreciation for good work. The downside of not achieving this can be seen across many commercial and social sectors today.
Thank for increasing awareness of these concerns and opportunities with your post.
This post is co-authored with Ben Garfinkel. It is cross-posted from the CEA blog. A PDF version can be found here.
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism m...
TL;DR: I'm releasing a website that ranks philanthropists according to EA principles and research, and allows users to re-rank the list using their own assumptions. I'd like feedback and help making it better. I'd especially like ideas for how to make the results more trustworthy. Funding may be available.
Crossposted to LessWrong.
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The $1B grant from Coefficient Giving to GiveWell is very exciting and will improve the lives of millions. Is it a change in the equilibrium of funding for implementation organisations within the cost-effectiveness focused global health and development space? I argue that it could be and share some thoughts of what the implications of that may mean.
Disclosure: I am the CEO of Fortify Health, an organisation that has received funding from GiveWell. I also sit on the Governance and Advisory Boards of organisations that have received funding from GiveWell. This article reflects my personal opinions and not those of Fortify Health or other associated organisations. I am not a neutral observer, and much of my optimism below is the optimism of a potential beneficiary. Please discount accordingly.
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On Thursday, Coefficient Giving announced a $1 billion commitment to GiveWell. I expect it to be a superb grant, funding interventions that are about as cost-effective as anything we know of. It will likely improve, if not save, millions of lives whilst also building the capacity of both GiveWell and recipient organisations for the future.
But it feels like more than a single grant. Coefficient were clear that this is "a one-off surge, not a new steady state", and that they are moving now to build capacity ahead of a much bigger wave of giving they expect in the coming years (GiveWell's own note on the commitment is here). Set that against the AI IPOs on the horizon and the windfall so many are anticipating (the "third wave" of American philanthropy) it is hard not to read this as the opening salvo in what may turn out to be a seismic shift in how global health and development gets funded.
None of this is new as a topic of conversation; plenty of folks have been talking about it for a while and there plenty of articles on the EA Forum itself discussing much of what I have laid out, frankly more eloquently. But it appears that it is now actually arriving, and I find I have a lot of feelings about it. I wanted to set them down honestly if nothing else, to concretize my own thoughts.
The Clear and Positive Case
Let me start with what I think is unambiguously good.
Highly cost-effective, evidence-based interventions may now have the funding they need to reach dramatically more people and improve their lives. With the collapse of USAID and the wider retreat of multilateral funding over the last two years, there is a real and painful gap for exactly the sort of interventions that are rigorous, cheap, and deserving of support. A billion dollars, deployed well, means more children sleeping under bed nets, more supplements reaching those who need them, more nutritious food, more unconditional transfers to people living in poverty. In the near term, this will help a very large number of people. This is great!
Additionally, the thing I deeply appreciate about GiveWell, whether or not you share their giving philosophy, is their commitment to radical transparency, to red teaming, and openness to feedback on their methodologies and calculations. These values give me, and hopefully the wider community, some comfort that they are bringing a growth mindset to their grantmaking rather than treating their models as settled truth. It is a large part of why I hold my fears and uncertainties somewhat weakly.
Concentrations of Funding
Jack Lewars has written cogently on his Funding Anthropalypse Substack about the risks of concentration. His core worry, which I largely share, is that when funds concentrate within a single funder operating from a single mindset, you lose diversification - and with it, you introduce the risk of a single methodological or philosophical error propagating through the whole system. Perhaps a fairer way to put it is not "error" but a systematic underweighting of a certain kind of giving, such that some interventions end up over-invested and others under-invested. This seems highly plausible to me, and I think the value of worldview and funding diversification is real.
Jack has covered the equilibrium of giving better than I could. I want to look at a different equilibrium ...
The Equilibrium of Implementation
The thesis: A funder's ability to disburse money well is operationally constrained. Nick Allardice, President and CEO of GiveDirectly, has made a version of this point well: a historic wave of money may be about to arrive, and the sector simply is not built to absorb it at the effectiveness and scale this moment demands. The capacity to move money well is itself a binding constraint. There are only so many grants a single person or team can make, and this is especially true for funders that hold the line on rigour, transparency, red teaming, and cost-effectiveness - values I admire and believe are core to impact, but which are slow and expensive to staff for.
The natural consequence is an incentive towards larger grants, disbursed more quickly, particularly for a funder without an endowment to draw down gradually, as is essentially the case with GiveWell (as I understand it).
GiveWell themselves are incredibly transparent in this, as they note, “Our researchers are explicitly searching for bigger opportunities than we’ve had the resources to investigate and to fund in the past. … Our growing team is investigating promising programs at a scale we haven’t previously been able to pursue.” As I read this, I understand this to infer that the organisations best placed to absorb a step-change in philanthropic capital quickly are the large multinationals and BINGOs (big international NGOs) that already have the operational, legal, and financial machinery in place around the world. They can take in significant sums fast, because the scaffolding already exists.
I want to be careful here. I see nothing intrinsically wrong with the interventions these organisations deliver, and while there are critiques of the BINGO model, that is not my argument. My argument is that if a wall of money flows preferentially to the largest and most easily-fundable organisations, we may quietly lose something that matters a great deal.
What’s the Matter with Individually Great Grant Making at a Larger Scale?
In the short term, more of the same feels fundamentally positive – millions of lives will improve. My concern is with the medium and longer term, and it runs along three lines.
What I worry about most is underinvestment and potential loss of innovation and nimbleness. The organisations working at the edges - locally-led organisations, new entrepreneurs coming out of Ambitious Impact Programs and similar incubation programs, and people simply experimenting - are the ones least able to access this kind of resource, and they are precisely the ones a creative non-profit landscape needs. This is the both/and I keep returning to: the sector is both extraordinarily effective and frustratingly conservative, depending on where you look, and it needs the big absorptive players and the small experimental ones. More of the same will not change the overall vector of global development. Changing that vector takes thousands of entrepreneurs trying thousands of interventions, most of which will fail, a few of which will be the next bed net (or wheat flour fortification … sorry, my bias kicked in).
Next, the implications on the labour market. A concentration of capital in the largest organisations will pull talent toward the players who can pay the most. Labour movement is sticky, so once people move, they tend to stay. It will also drive up salaries, which I actually think is a good thing: so many of us in global health and development are, frankly, underpaid and running on intrinsic motivation, and a correction there is overdue. However, this can also calcify talent within certain types of organisations, pricing out smaller (read as more likely to be innovative) organisations that may deserve to scale.
Finally I am concerned with a loss of M&E rigour, and it is the one closest to my own work. A large and fast influx of capital puts pressure on the very epistemics that make cost-effective giving cost-effective in the first place. It is worth saying plainly, as I have argued before, that a potentially highly cost-effective intervention on paper is not the same thing as a cost-effectively implemented one, as we have seen with Dispensers for Safe Water. The modelled figure and the realised impact on the ground can diverge sharply, and the only way to know is to monitor implementation fidelity and hold on to a healthy scepticism about whether the money is actually doing what the model says it should. Given the enormous opportunity cost of these potentially larger grants, that discipline matters even more.
This kind of monitoring is neither cheap nor quick, and I think that can be under-appreciated. Take the area I know best, anaemia reduction. Testing implementation fidelity at the beneficiary level is time-consuming, and the core indicators of whether anaemia is actually falling - haemoglobin and serum ferritin - can take up to twelve months to shift in a way you can validly measure and attribute to fortification. Good monitoring and evaluation often takes time, and if the dominant incentive is to move money quickly, that is precisely the sort of slow, unglamorous rigour that can get squeezed or alternatively shift away from interventions that are simply too time-consuming to monitor and evaluate.
What might help
None of this is an argument against the grant. To Coefficient Giving's real credit, this $1 billion appears squarely focused on building absorptive capacity - both GiveWell's own, and that of the key recipients it funds. What I fear is that we end up building the absorptive capacity of only a subset of the sector. It is, without doubt, a highly impactful subset and one that can reach huge numbers of people. But it may leave underweighted exactly the players who could drive the innovation and creativity we will need over the long term. So this becomes an argument for pairing the grant with deliberate investment in absorptive capacity further down the pipeline. A few mechanisms seem worth serious consideration:
Ring-fencing a portion of funds for smaller and medium-sized organisations, explicitly accepting that the cost-effectiveness of funder time will be lower for these grants or regranting. This is a real cost, and I think it may be worth paying. Ultra Philanthropy (as one example) appears to be doing exactly this and could serve as a highly effective hedge to the risks I have laid out.
Investing in operational scaffolding so that smaller organisations can scale and absorb funding without building every function (particularly operationa functions) from scratch. Scaling fellowships are one route (similar to Mulago Fellowships, 100x, and The Nudge Accelerator) focused on organisations implementing evidence-based, highly cost-effective interventions. Secondary or shared-service organisations are another - Health Progress Hub, Impact Ops, High Impact Professionals, Consultants for Impact, and others in this space can meaningfully reduce the operational burden of scaling.
Funding nimbler monitoring and evaluation that can generate credible evidence for uncertain innovations on shorter timelines. A/B testing, robust internally run M&E frameworks: systems that support evidence that arrives fast enough to actually steer an experimenting organisation towards cost-effective impact.
The common thread is that the highest-leverage use of some of this money may not be another large grant to a proven recipient, but investment in the capacity of others to become fundable at all.
Closing
I think this is the start of a catalytic moment: an opportunity to lift billions of lives and to sustain the innovation and nimbleness the sector will need for the problems that come after. I feel real gratitude for the generosity and foresight of the individuals behind this, and I am confident their giving will improve an enormous number of lives.
Given the deep uncertainties of the medium and long term, though - including AI's own implications for wealth, labor, and the shape of economic development - I think a little caution is warranted. My sense is that the right posture is to welcome this wholeheartedly while protecting worldview diversification and working actively to minimize the risks of concentration in who may be delivering interventions.
I am far from certain about any of this, and I would love to hear where others think I have got it wrong.
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Great post, thanks for writing it (and appreciate the shout outs for Ultra/our Mid-stage Global Health Fund).
One way to frame this is as an opportunity for all non-cG GiveWell donors to give to these other parts of the scaffolding this year. Given that cG's grant covers the majority or all of GiveWell's expected grantmaking in 2026, this frees up other donors to redirect funding, and then they can always return to the bigger GiveWell next year if it needs more regranting funds.