Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What we fund, #1: We fund many opportunities outside our top charities, published by GiveWell on March 23, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Author: Isabel Arjmand

This post is the fourth in a multi-part series, covering how GiveWell works and what we fund. We'll add links to the later posts here as they're published. Through these posts, we hope to give a better understanding of what our research looks like and how we make decisions.

How we work, #1: Cost-effectiveness is generally the most important factor in our recommendations

How we work, #2: We look at specific opportunities, not just general interventions

How we work, #3: Our analyses involve judgment calls

GiveWell aims to find and fund programs that have the greatest impact on global well-being. We're open to funding whichever global health and development opportunities seem most cost-effective. So while our

top charities list is still what we're best known for, it's only part of our impact; we also dedicate substantial funding and research effort to opportunities beyond top charities.

In 2022, 71% of the funds we directed supported our four current top charities, and 29% were directed to other programs.[1] However, most of our research capacity goes toward programs other than our top charities. This is because (a) most programs we direct funding to aren't top charities (we have four top charities but directed funding to about 40 other grantees in 2022),[2] and (b) it requires more effort to investigate a program we know less deeply.

In this post we'll share:

The overall scope of our grantmaking

Why we dedicate funding and research capacity to programs other than our top charities

The types of opportunities we support

You can support the full range of our grantmaking via the

All Grants Fund.

The scope of our work

Our research is focused on global health and development programs. We believe this is an area in which donations can be especially cost-effective.

Much of our funding goes to health programs, especially programs that reduce deaths from infectious diseases among young children living in low- and middle-income countries. We've found donations to such programs can make a particularly large impact; babies and young children are much more susceptible to infectious disease than adults, and diseases like malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia can be prevented fairly cheaply.

The evidence for health programs is often strong relative to other areas, and it's more likely to generalize from one context to another.

While the majority of our funding goes to programs that support child health, that isn't our exclusive focus. For example, we also consider programs that aim to improve household income or consumption, such as

One Acre Fund's tree program and

Bridges to Prosperity. In addition, many of the child health programs we support may also have other benefits, like reducing medical costs, increasing later-in-life income, or improving adult health.

Why make grants outside top charities?

Our top charities continue to be our top recommendations for donors who prioritize confidence in their giving. They have strong track records of delivering programs at large scale and the capacity to absorb more funding, and we've followed their work for years.

We have such

strict criteria for top charities that we'd be limiting our impact if we only recommended funding to them. Some highly cost-effective programs might not meet those criteria, and we don't want to artificially constrain the impact we can have. For example,

r.i.ce.'s kangaroo mother care program isn't operating at a large enough scale and we haven't funded it long enough for it to be a top charity. However, we think the program will cost-effectively improve the lives of low-birthweight babies, so we made a grant to support it.

Initially, our non-top charity grant...