GiveWell

So there are organizations out there, there are two that we, um, are, are big fans of.

One is called GiveWell and one is called The Life You Can Save, and they do, um, rigorous data analysis, um, looking at charities, um, and their interventions across time, um, looking at charities where, um, the cause area has a huge, um, ability to take more funding.

'Cause there are some charities where the work they do is wonderful, but they've kind of reached the limit of what they can do.

And then there are other charities where, um, there's so much more that they can, um, achieve.

GiveWell fundraising up forty-nine percent in 2025, driven overwhelmingly by thirty-nine donors giving one million dollars plus.

By Rasool.

Published on October 2nd, 2026.

Previously, GiveWell raised less than its tenth percentile forecast in 2023.

Asterisk GiveWell fundraising up seventeen percent in 2024.

GiveWell has published its 2025 metrics together with a metrics report and a public spreadsheet.

As in previous years, I focus on how much was raised and who gave it.

This year I also look at how concentrated GiveWell's donor base is.

Whatever you rely on, ask it to show its work.

Which assumptions drive the answer? What's being counted as zero, and what would change the recommendation? If it's possible to be famous for your spreadsheets, GiveWell, the charity evaluator, is.

To decide whether malaria nets do more good per dollar than deworming pills, they build models with dozens of inputs, such as how many nets are actually used, how common malaria is in each region, and how much a child's health today affects their earnings decades later.

It's a heroic effort built and refined over the last nineteen years that tries to pin down all the uncertainties they have about this complex question.

Each of these is a number.

Change a couple, and the answer can flip.

GiveWell's spreadsheet isn't more complicated structurally than the reasoning underlying the ten-second model.

It's equally complicated, just visible and inspectable.

For instance, in his influential climate change and long-termism, John Halstead writes, "In my view, climate change is one of the most important problems in the world, but other problems, including engineered viruses, advanced artificial intelligence, and nuclear war, are more pressing on the margin because they are so neglected." That being said, many donors have a near to medium-term view and therefore may be directly comparing donating to climate mitigation.

For instance, through the Giving Green Fund or the Founder's Pledge Climate Fund to Global Health and Development, GHD, options such as giving through Coefficient Giving's Global Health and Wellbeing, GHW, Fund or GiveWell's, GW, Top Charities Fund.

Yet until recently, to my knowledge, there was no quantitative work doing this cross-cause comparison.

That's why I was delighted to see new research from Rethink Priorities, Claire and Vargas 2026, that seeks to quantitatively compare the cost-effectiveness of GHW interventions to climate mitigation, specifically by comparing the benchmark of one to two dollars tCO2e sought by the climate funds to the funding bar of Coefficient Giving GiveWell.

The crux of this comparison lies in the calculation of the social cost of carbon, SCC, or the amount of societal damage caused by a ton of CO2 emissions.

The findings: Climate donations are competitive with GHD and are more cost-effective than GHD under certain sets of assumptions.

Complex systems such as behavior of ice melt from glacier and the Earth's changing reflectivity could have large human effects that are not incorporated in current damage models.

Additionally, it is very hard to predict how human adaptation and technological progress will allow society to adapt to changing temperatures.

A recently completed report from Rethink Priorities calculated Impala to have a cost per DALY averted of seven to $17 in pediatric care and 12 to $30 in neonatal care.

This translates to around 76 times and 28 times unconditional cash transfers respectively for pediatrics and neonates against GiveWell's bar, and roughly 1100 times and 4400 times on Co-Efficient Giving scale against their 1000 times bar.

RP corrected for study design and robustness of findings by applying a 60% internal validity and a 30% external validity discount to our measured mortality effects, arriving at roughly 12% for pediatric wards and 7% for neonatal units.

RP concluded that even at one to two percent relative reduction, the intervention would still be cost-effective.

Eight of these point towards lower mortality.

RP's reading is that our evidence consistently points to a mortality benefit but does not establish its size, so its model discounts heavily RP combined our evidence into weighted averages which led to the number of forty-two percent mortality reduction for pediatric wards and twenty-six percent mortality reduction for neonatal units.

It then applied a sixty percent internal validity discount and a thirty percent external validity discount in line with how GiveWell treats non-randomized evidence.

That left a modeled effect of twelve percent mortality reduction in pediatric wards and seven percent in neonatal units.

I made a related argument in a twenty sixteen post.

GiveWell's charity recommendations require taking a controversial stance on population ethics.

GiveWell recommendations assume that the value of a life saved derives precisely from the extra years of life lived, but also that there is nothing bad about causing someone not to be born, thus preventing them from experiencing sixty to eighty years of life.

I showed that the apparent contradiction in this view is difficult to escape.

The most straightforward resolution is that the Against Malaria Foundation is an order of magnitude less cost effective than GiveWell's estimate suggests.

Subheading.

Example two.

a big focus has always been on improving the lot of the world's poorest people.

In the year to January 31, 2026, GiveWell, an effective altruist charity evaluator, directed $427 million to programs such as malaria net distribution, vaccination, and malnutrition treatment, which it estimates will save around 86,000 lives.

Others have lobbied corporations to pledge to stop buying eggs from hens that are confined in tiny cages, a practice that the overwhelming majority of Americans oppose.

Largely as a result of this pressure, around 100m hens have been spared from the worst forms of caged confinement.

This newspaper warns against the single-minded pursuit of any goal, even if there are highly compelling arguments for it.

I agree, and effective altruists have been saying so for years.

In 2022 Holden Karnofsky, a co-founder of GiveWell, wrote, I think it's a bad idea to embrace the core ideas of EA without limits or reservations.

We as EAs need to constantly inject pluralism and moderation.