Summary:

The Global Health and Wellbeing Fund directs funding to highly effective organisations working to improve human wellbeing. When you donate to this fund, the Giving What We Can research team will pool your money with other donors’ contributions and allocate quarterly, working with the evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to maximise impact. Currently, the research team consults with GiveWell when determining where to allocate funds.

You might want to donate to this fund if:

• You care about helping people who are living today.
• You want to make a concrete difference in the lives of others, and care especially about saving lives and reducing suffering.
• You want to be confident your money will go to highly effective funding opportunities, based on the latest research of the Giving What We Can research team, in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers they’ve vetted.

Learn more about the types of problems donors help solve when they donate to this fund.

General information about the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund

What is the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund and how does it work?

The Global Health and Wellbeing Fund is one of three funds managed by Giving What We Can. Each of these funds directs donations based on our research team’s latest research on charity evaluators and their recommendations, with the aim to help donors with a variety of worldviews maximise their impact. All of these Giving What We Can managed funds work the same way: Giving What We Can collects your donation, pools it with the donations of other donors, and then disburses the funds to highly effective projects working within the fund’s cause area.

What types of projects does the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund support?

The Global Health and Wellbeing Fund supports projects that aim to make a concrete difference in the lives of people living today, for instance those who are suffering and dying from preventable diseases related to solvable (but underfunded) global health issues. These projects include both highly tractable, evidence-based interventions (such as those of our recommended charities working in global health and wellbeing) as well as more hits-based approaches (of the type supported by GiveWell’s All Grants Fund).

Some examples of the kinds of projects the fund might support include charities that save lives and prevent illness by distributing insecticide-treated nets or vitamin A supplements, as well as initiatives that could lead to huge improvements in illness and death prevention, like studying the impact of certain water quality interventions.

Can you provide more details about where my money will go?

Grants from the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund may take a variety of forms, based on the funding opportunities our research team believes to be exceptionally impactful given their latest research. These opportunities will be determined in consultation with evaluators and grantmakers identified — through the research team’s evaluator investigations — to be particularly well-suited to helping donors maximise their impact.

More specifically, this may include allocations to:

• Charities or projects recommended by an evaluator/grantmaker the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to Against Malaria Foundation, which is recommended by GiveWell).
• A fund run by an evaluator the research team has evaluated (such as a grant to whichever GiveWell funds can best use it).
• Charities or projects the research team has reason to believe are highly impactful, including cases where this reasoning isn’t the result of deferring to a vetted evaluator (though we expect this to be rare, as the research team generally evaluates evaluators rather than individual charities or projects).

Which projects has the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund granted to in the past?

This is a new fund as of November 2023; it will make its first quarterly round of grants in early 2024.

For this first round, we expect to allocate donations to this fund in consultation with GiveWell, based on our recent evaluation of its work. In practice, this will likely closely resemble the grantmaking of GiveWell’s All Grants Fund. You can read more about the types of grants made by the All Grants Fund here. Our research team may identify new funding opportunities (outside of those recommended by GiveWell) in future grantmaking rounds.

Donating to the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund

Why you might donate to this fund

Previously, we recommended several different top-rated funds for each of the cause areas we believe to be particularly impactful. However, donors often weren’t sure how to choose between these top-rated funds working in the same area. The goal of this fund (and the other two funds managed by Giving What We Can) is to provide a single high-impact default fund option for each cause area. We think these funds are a great choice for most donors, as our research team makes allocation decisions in consultation with the evaluators and grantmakers they believe to be best suited for maximising impact in each particular cause area.

Why you might not donate to this fund

Our funds are currently only advised by the grantmakers and evaluators our research team has already looked into as part of their 2023 evaluations of evaluators and deemed to be the best candidates for informing our grantmaking. This means there may be other impact-focused evaluators our research team has not yet looked into but that you believe to be better matched to your personal values and worldview.

If you prefer to look into impact-focused charity evaluators on your own and follow the recommendations of the one(s) you believe best suit you, or do your own research into individual funds and charities, we recommend you read our research team’s evaluator reports, as they provide information that most donors could not access on their own.

How does donating to this fund compare to similar giving opportunities?

Donating to this fund vs donating to one of GiveWell’s funds

To be clear, we think donating to a GiveWell fund is also an exceptionally good option; GiveWell has several different funds and you can donate to any of them on our donation platform.

Currently, donating to Giving What We Can’s Global Health and Wellbeing Fund is fairly similar to donating to a GiveWell fund, since the Giving What We Can research team consults with GiveWell when determining this fund’s quarterly allocations. That said, the Giving What We Can research team may consult with other expert evaluators (who can recommend grants in areas that might not be covered by GiveWell’s work) in the future, based on the outcomes of their ongoing research. Thus, donating to the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund allows you to set up a single recurring donation and know that your money will be allocated based on the most up-to-date evaluator research from the Giving What We Can research team.

Donating to this fund vs donating to a different global health and wellbeing fund

We currently only recommend GiveWell funds as top-rated fund options within global health and wellbeing. (See above for how donating to a GiveWell fund differs from this fund.) However, we may add additional top-rated funds in the future. In other words, the fact that another global health and wellbeing fund doesn’t appear on our list of recommendations does not necessarily mean it’s not an impactful giving opportunity, but may mean that our research team hasn’t yet looked into it as part of their recent evaluations. As such, we can’t (yet) be sure how these opportunities differ from donating to the Global Health and Wellbeing Fund managed by our research team, except to say that we are confident the allocations our Global Health and Wellbeing Fund makes will always reflect our research team’s latest research into which evaluators and grantmakers they think are best suited to help donors maximise their impact. As the research team looks into additional evaluators, we will revisit both our list of recommendations and who we consult with to allocate the donations collected via our funds.

Donating to this fund vs donating to our recommended charities working on global health and wellbeing

We typically recommend donating to funds over charities as a general rule of thumb; this option capitalises on the free expertise of fund managers and advisors, whose job it is to direct the money received as effectively as possible given the most up-to-date information available to them.

An added benefit of choosing a Giving What We Can fund over selecting from our individual top-rated charities is that you won’t need to manually change your selections later if we update our recommendations. That said, if you prefer to have greater control over which projects you support within a particular cause area, we recommend selecting from our top-rated charities.

Learn more about the advantages of donating through a fund.

Donating to this fund vs donating to other supported programs working on global health and wellbeing

This fund will allocate based on the research team’s latest research into evaluators and their recommendations. However, our research team doesn’t look at every evaluator. Additionally, the evaluators they look at don’t evaluate every charity. (Instead, impact-focused evaluators tend to identify particularly promising programs and then find organisations that implement these programs especially well, though they also don’t have the capacity to evaluate every promising charity.) If you prefer to widen the scope of the organisations you support, you may be interested in investigating some of the other supported programs on our donation platform that we haven’t (for various reasons) included in our recommendations.

The difference between donating to our other supported programs working on global health and wellbeing and donating to this fund is that we are confident in the expected impact of the projects this fund will grant to, while we have varying degrees of confidence in the impact of our other supported programs. (Some may turn out to be more impactful than the projects we’ll grant to, but haven’t yet been looked into by an evaluator our research team has vetted, and some may be significantly less impactful.) You can read more about each supported program on its dedicated page.