This year, our research team is focused on two primary goals. The first is to rapidly scale our capabilities so we’re able to move much more donor funding to highly cost-effective programs in the near future. The second is to grant at least $500 million to the best opportunities we can find this year to save and improve lives.
Over the past several years, GiveWell has doubled the size of our research team to deepen and broaden our search for highly impactful programs. Our 60 researchers are now distributed among 11 subteams that cover a number of global health and development cause areas, as well as core research needs.
Below you’ll find a summary of the key approaches each subteam is using this year to find new opportunities to help people in need as much as we can.
Malaria
Antimalarial Medicines
Vector Control
Malaria Cross-Cutting Research
Nutrition
Vaccination
Water
Livelihoods
New Areas
Cross-Cutting Research
Research Support and Operations
Research Operations
Commons
Malaria
People: Marinella Capriati, Zoe Hartman
Malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when people are bitten by infected mosquitoes, is a leading cause of death globally, especially for young children in Africa, who make up around 70% of the approximately 600,000 malaria deaths worldwide each year.1See the WHO fact sheet on malaria, which states “Globally in 2024, there were an estimated 282 million malaria cases and 610 000 malaria deaths in 80 countries…the WHO African Region was home to 95% of malaria cases (265 million) and 95% (579,000) of malaria deaths. Children under 5 accounted for about 75% of all malaria deaths in the Region.” 75% * 95% = 71%. jQuery(‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_16544_1_1’).tooltip({ tip: ‘#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_16544_1_1’, tipClass: ‘footnote_tooltip’, effect: ‘fade’, predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: ‘top right’, relative: true, offset: [10, 10], }); While malaria prevention has long been a focus for GiveWell, the growing capacity and specialized expertise on our malaria team are allowing us to take on this challenge now in a way that would not have been possible even a few years ago. Our malaria research subteam, with 15 people, is the largest of our research teams and is divided into three subteams.
Antimalarial Medicines
People: Sarah Tougher, Robin Dey, Sam Aman
The Antimalarial Medicines subteam focuses on medicines that either prevent or treat infections from malaria parasites. Prevention and treatment are managed as an integrated portfolio because they use the same products, and programming and policy decisions in one area have direct implications for the other. For example, decisions about which antimalarial to use in one intervention may have potential implications for drug resistance in another. In 2026, the team plans to