It has been a tumultuous year for global health. In early 2025, the US government cut billions of dollars in foreign aid, affecting millions of people around the world and creating substantial uncertainty that continues to ripple through health and development programs around the world.
Drawing on almost two decades of cost-effectiveness research and analysis, GiveWell assessed the effects in real time and identified funding gaps where donors’ contributions could have exceptional impact. Our actions were guided by our core principles:
Search for highly cost-effective giving opportunities, even in uncertain circumstances.
Rigorously evaluate those opportunities and share our research publicly, while acknowledging that timely action sometimes requires accepting higher uncertainty.
Direct funds to where we think they’ll do the most good, considering both immediate needs and long-term implications.
Our response so far
In response to funding shortfalls, we funded time-sensitive opportunities to ensure that cost-effective programs could continue. And in response to substantial uncertainty and in expectation of growing needs, we engaged in efforts to research new areas and prepare ourselves for the future. You can read some examples of our response later in this post.
So far this year, we’ve made 98 grants, 23 of which directly address urgent and cost-effective needs created by the funding cuts. These grants represent around $39 million—just over 10 percent of the total funds we expect to direct this year. However, most of our research and the programs we fund have been affected by the cuts in some way.
How you can help
As the year comes to a close, we invite you to join us in doing the most good we can together. With fewer resources going to global health and development programs, we believe giving now has a greater potential impact than before the cuts. Donating to one of our giving funds enables us to direct it toward the best opportunities we find. We encourage you to donate to the one that makes the most sense for you (we describe them in more detail below).
Funding time-sensitive opportunities
In order to have the greatest impact, we’ve focused our response to the funding cuts on filling the most cost-effective gaps we find rather than trying to replace lost funding more generally. The grants we’ve approved cover a variety of issue areas and approaches, such as funding guarantees, program support, health supplies, advisory support for governments, and research.
Funding guarantees
The uncertainty caused by funding cuts disrupted many global health programs, and in some cases GiveWell funding guarantees were able to keep these programs moving forward. For example, in April 2025 we