The END Fund
Deworming Program
The END Fund raises and provides capital for programmes to control and eliminate neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). It also provides technical and strategic support for NGOs, governments, and various stakeholders to advance NTD treatment programmes and delivery.
What problem is The END Fund’s deworming programme working on?
The END Fund reports that 1.7 billion people worldwide need treatment for intestinal worms, most of them children. Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) cause severe pain and long-term disability and lead to death for more than 170,000 people per year. Children who are infected suffer from malnutrition, cognitive impairment, stunted growth, and the inability to attend school. Many people who are infected are unable to work to provide for themselves or their families and are left in a cycle of poverty.
What does The END Fund do?
The END Fund mobilises resources from a diverse range of investors and directs them to partners who can deliver them where they will have the most impact. It focuses on delivering NTD treatments by:
- Growing and engaging a community of activist-philanthropists.
- Managing high-impact strategic investments.
- Working in collaboration with government, NGO, pharmaceutical, and academic partners.
- Taking a systems approach to understanding, engaging with, and influencing the broad ecosystem of stakeholders working on ending NTDs.
More specifically, The END Fund:
- Raises and directs money for NTD elimination through outreach; awareness-building; and engagement with donors, philanthropists, and leaders within the private and public sectors.
- Strategically manages an investment portfolio with the aim of ending widespread NTDs by 2030, identifying key investment opportunities and helping build coalitions and collaborations.
- Works with NGOs to design and implement NTD programmes.
- Provides technical and strategic support to partner organisations, institutions, industry, and governments; and manages grants.
- Conducts monitoring and evaluation to understand the impact of its various initiatives, and help advance the knowledge base of the NTD and global health communities, thus informing programmes and decisions.
The END Fund’s deworming branch helps treat and work toward the elimination of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiasis.
As of 2022, The END Fund reports that its work has helped provide over 1.2 billion treatments since its founding in 2012, with 118 million treatments in 2021 alone.
What information does Giving What We Can have about the cost-effectiveness of The END Fund’s deworming programme?
The impact-focused evaluator Founders Pledge conducted an internal analysis of the cost-effectiveness of The END Fund’s deworming programme in 2023 with a favourable conclusion. The END Fund’s deworming programme was also previously one of our recommended charities due to GiveWell’s inclusion of it as a top-rated giving opportunity from 2016 to 2022. GiveWell’s decision to no longer recommend The END Fund’s deworming programme was not based on any shift in thinking about The END Fund, but rather a change in GiveWell’s top charity criteria.
Some research shows that deworming has positive effects on improved life outcomes like school attendance and income earnings. There is also some uncertainty surrounding findings that link deworming programmes to improved life outcomes — see GiveWell’s in-depth report on the case for mass deworming.
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.