GiveWell
Top Charities Fund
The Top Charities Fund supports the highest-priority funding needs among GiveWell’s top charities, which are evidence-backed, high-impact, and highly cost-effective opportunities to save and improve the lives of people living in low- and lower-middle-income countries.
What problem is the Top Charities Fund working on?
GiveWell’s top charities work to improve health and wellbeing in low-income countries. Donations to the Top Charities Fund are granted on a rolling basis to its top charities with the highest-priority funding needs.
What projects does the Top Charities Fund support?
GiveWell’s top charities are the best opportunities its researchers have identified for donors looking to confidently make a significant impact with their gifts. Thoroughly vetted by GiveWell’s research team, these programs are evidence-backed, transparent, and able to use additional funding cost-effectively.
Supporting the Top Charities Fund allows GiveWell to direct funds where they will have the most impact according to its latest cost-effectiveness estimates and research on funding needs.
Recent grant recipients include:
- Malaria Consortium — seasonal malaria chemoprevention programme
- Helen Keller International — vitamin A supplementation programme
- New Incentives — programme to promote routine vaccination in Nigeria
- Against Malaria Foundation — programme to provide long-lasting insecticide-treated bednets
See the Fund webpage for more information about how donations are allocated, past recipients, and plans for the future.
(GiveWell has changed the name of the fund previously known as the "Maximum Impact Fund" to the "Top Charities Fund" as of September 8, 2022.)
Why do we include the Top Charities Fund on our list of recommended programs?
We investigated the impact-focused charity evaluator GiveWell as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations and concluded that GiveWell’s recommendations and grantmaking approach are well-suited to helping donors maximise the impact of their “dollar” in the global health and wellbeing space. You can read our report on GiveWell here.
Please note that GWWC does not evaluate individual charities. Our recommendations are based on the research of third-party, impact-focused charity evaluators our research team has found to be particularly well-suited to help donors do the most good per dollar, according to their recent evaluator investigations. Our other supported programs are those that align with our charitable purpose — they are working on a high-impact problem and take a reasonably promising approach (based on publicly-available information).
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.