Every month we send an email newsletter to our supporters sharing recent updates from our work. We publish selected portions of the newsletter on our blog to make this news more accessible to people who visit our website. For key updates from the latest installment, please see below!
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Looking Back to Give Better
GiveWell’s research doesn’t end once we’ve made a grant. We evaluate a subset of completed grants, comparing what we thought would happen to what actually took place, then try to use what we learn to improve our future funding decisions. Over the past year, our growing research capacity has enabled us to expand this work and publish comprehensive “lookbacks” for select grants.
Our latest podcast episode illustrates why this matters. In 2021, we made a grant to Fortify Health, an organization that works to reduce anemia by partnering with wheat flour mills in India to fortify their products with iron, folic acid, and vitamin B12. We had supported Fortify Health through two smaller grants in 2018 and 2019, but we weren’t sure if the program could reach sufficient scale to meet our cost-effectiveness funding threshold. By 2021, our best guess was that if the program continued to grow, it would likely meet that threshold.
After conducting a lookback analysis to understand how the 2021 grant performed relative to our initial estimates, we found that the program was far more cost-effective than we originally estimated. Fortify Health had grown its fortified flour production 30-fold, reached more people than projected, and spent significantly less than budgeted. Based on this exciting finding, we recently renewed our support to Fortify Health with a $10 million two-year grant. The lookback also gave us a way to assess why we had underestimated the likely impact of the 2021 grant and to improve our processes so we can make better estimates in the future.
Lookbacks are a relatively new process for GiveWell—we published our first lookbacks in 2025 and have now built them into our ongoing research processes. To learn about this recent expansion of our work, join us for our upcoming webinar, Looking Back to Give Better: How GiveWell Evaluates Its Grantmaking, on Tuesday, June 9, with Elie and Program Directors Alex Cohen and Julie Faller. They’ll walk through the methodology behind lookbacks, share findings from our grant evaluations so far, and answer audience questions. Register here.
GiveWell CEO Named to TIME100 Philanthropy List
GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld was recently named to