Introduction

This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's grantmaking from January 1, 2025 to March 31, 2025 (3 months). It follows the previous October–December 2024 payout report.

As mentioned in the 2024 review and the previous payout report, the Animal Welfare Fund  (AWF) made a conscious decision to increase transparency and prioritize more frequent communications about our work. As part of those efforts, we've resumed regular publication of detailed payout reports after previously reducing our public reporting to focus fund manager capacity on grant evaluations. With additional support now in place, we've streamlined our reporting process to provide comprehensive information about our grants and their intended impact. Given that these are recent grants, outcome data will not be included in the initial payout reports. We plan to share these reports quarterly to keep the community informed of our grantmaking activities.

Update to private grant reporting
While we aim to increase the AWF’s transparency, we also recognize the important benefits that private grants provide: protecting organizations from government harassment, reducing risks of damage to strategic relationships between organizations and industry players, and maintaining security for sensitive work. We don't want strong applicants to be discouraged from applying due to concerns about public reporting and therefore miss out on the impact they could have. 

To balance the risks that public reporting has with the benefits of transparency, we are establishing a new approach for private reporting: private grants will be included within payout reports, but we will include them in an anonymized format (e.g. “$350,000 - across three organizations working on fish welfare”, or “$120,000 - welfare improvements in East Asia”), and in some cases, still only list the amount and not the purpose, (e.g. “$50,000 - private grant”). The latter will only be done if we think disclosing details poses a risk of harming organizations (or individuals) or their goals/impact, and therefore the animals. To provide more transparency, those grants will be included in aggregated summaries like this.

If you are a substantial donor to the AWF or are planning to donate a large amount, but would like to learn more about those private grants, you can reach out to the AWF’s Chair, Karolina, at [email protected], and after conducting donor due diligence, we will make an effort to share more details to the extent possible.

Overview of Q1, 2025 grants

• Total funding paid out: $1,209,017
• Number of grants paid out: 13

• Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 14/144 = 9.7% ^[1]

• Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 14/38 = 36.8%

Highlighted Grants

Highlighted grants correspond to grants that the AWF team rated highly, usually because they thought the grant was very likely to be very cost-effective or the potential upside was likely very high.

The Center for Responsible Seafood ($117,000): Research & pilot program on humane chill-killing at Indian shrimp farms to inform global certification standards

Shrimp are the most farmed animals globally (~440B annually) yet receive minimal welfare protections during slaughter. In March 2025, AWF provided this grant to fund TCRS together with a research partner from Professor Amaya Albalat's leading crustacean welfare lab. The researchers will test whether properly implemented ice slurry methods can effectively stun shrimp and reduce pain during slaughter in the real environment of a shrimp farm in a hot climate rather than in a lab environment with more controlled conditions. This method will also be compared at a small scale to electrical stunning (with collaboration from the Shrimp Welfare Project). Based on the outcome of this research, TCRS aims to develop practical humane slaughter guidelines and report the outcomes of their work to the Global Seafood Alliance for consideration in their certification standards of Best Aquaculture Practices, which certifies 11% of global shrimp production.
This initiative could impact around 50 billion shrimp annually by ensuring shrimp are killed more humanely than through asphyxiation. Even if the research doesn’t prove that chill-killing can be done humanely in those conditions, and therefore won’t be recommended, this project still provides valuable information that can inform advocacy for electrical stunning. This project is likely to be incredibly cost-effective, and it has a clear theory of change and a high likelihood of success as a result of the organization’s strong track record and leadership. Additionally, despite the massive scale of impact, shrimp welfare is a neglected cause, giving the AWF a unique position to support work in this area.

Animal Policy International ($57,700): Advocacy work on applying local animal welfare standards to imports

The AWF recommended a grant to Animal Policy International (API), which works on trade and farmed animal welfare. Their current focus is on addressing a loophole in animal welfare policy: when governments ban cruel practices like battery cages, these standards don’t usually apply to imports. This effectively offshores factory farming, undermines public expectations for real change, and places local farmers at a disadvantage.
API advocates for countries with more robust farmed animal welfare standards to apply their domestic standards to imported products.
Their work includes collaboration with policymakers and other stakeholders to address this issue. While work of this type may be challenging, a successful policy change could result in welfare improvements for many animals; for example, in New Zealand alone, this could prevent suffering for approximately 9 million fish, 500,000 pigs, and 300,000 chickens annually, while establishing an international precedent that could improve welfare standards globally. With operations in both New Zealand and the UK, API is already making progress toward introducing impactful legislation.

Animal Welfare League ($130,000): A budget to support cage-free policy work in Ghana and recruiting cage-free farms in South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco

In January 2025, the Animal Welfare Fund provided a grant of $130,000 to the Animal Welfare League (AWL) to support policy advocacy to establish national poultry standards in Ghana and cage-free directories in South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco. AWL’s political advocacy in Ghana is especially timely as Ghana is developing new poultry certification standards, giving AWL leverage to create lasting improvements in welfare standards. AWL already signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ghana Standards Authority confirming that AWL can work on developing those standards, which could indicate initial interest, and therefore higher probability of success. While ensuring enforcement of such laws could still be a challenge, AWL is aware of the need for attention to that and aims to address it (e.g. through increased training, a certification scheme, or other solutions). This work could also provide valuable information to the movement, regardless of its success.
Moreover, large multinational companies seeking to fulfill cage-free commitments in Africa have requested the support of the AWL to identify recommended producers. Therefore, AWL plans to establish cage-free directories in South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco. These three countries currently have more than 90 million caged hens, so by making it easier for companies to fulfill their commitments, AWL’s efforts have the potential to improve welfare on a massive scale. While Africa has the fastest-growing egg production out of any continent and is projected to surpass Asia and Latin America in poultry production around 2030, this 2021 Farmed Animal Funders report demonstrated that it is the least funded region, and Animal Advocacy Africa estimates that less than 3% of general animal welfare funding in Africa is devoted to farmed animal welfare. Additionally, this continent has the fewest cage-free commitments. The AWL’s strong track record, strategic leadership, and expertise in cage-free advocacy position them to effectively utilize this funding to improve the welfare of the massive, growing population of hens in Africa.

Grants Funded with AWF’s Partners

As described in the previous payout report, AWF has increased collaboration with other funders, either through recommending particular funding opportunities that meet partners' criteria or through co-funding. In some of those cases, the partner organization completes due diligence, issues a grant agreement, and pays out the grant, but the AWF still receives progress reports from the organization to track the grant’s success, but they are not included in the “total funding paid out” since the AWF does not provide the funding. This quarter, we recommended and co-funded several grants:

• Recommendation to a partner organization:
  • Sinergia Animal (286,000 EUR)
  • The Humane League (190,000 EUR)
  • Animal Policy International (55,000 EUR)
    • This grant was co-funded with AWF.
• Co-funding:
  • We facilitated a co-funding round, which led to other funders committing $195,000 in funding for invertebrate work, on top of $308,500 in funding provided by AWF.  

All Grants We Made During This Time Period

Below is a full list of all 13 grants, totaling $1,209,017, that the Animal Welfare Fund made during this period.

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     Both calculations of the acceptance rate include the 13 paid out grants and one approved (but not yet paid out) grant.