GiveWell Conversations

About GiveWell Conversations

Welcome to GiveWell’s podcast sharing the latest updates on our work. Tune in for conversations with GiveWell staff members discussing current priorities of our Research team and recent developments in the global health landscape.

Publisher

GiveWell

Category

business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

19 Mar 2025

Latest episode

1 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

37 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   1 Oct 2026

   Behind the Research: How Our Team Tackles Hard Questions

   In an effort to direct substantially more funding to the most cost-effective opportunities we can find to help people, GiveWell’s research is expanding in two directions at once: going broader, to cover more areas of global health and development, and going deeper, to improve the inputs that inform our decision-making. This episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at how this expansion is playing out on GiveWell’s research team, as three researchers each describe a project they have taken on: reassessing how to prevent childhood pneumonia deaths, building a better estimate of how many children die of malaria, and developing an AI tool to check our work for errors. In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Dilhan Perera, Senior Researcher James Watson, and Research Analyst Meghna Ray about the projects they’ve worked on and what it’s like to do research at GiveWell. Elie, Dilhan, James, and Meghna discuss: Changing direction as we follow the evidence: Pneumonia causes around 10% to 15% of deaths among children under five globally. Our New Areas research subteam, which investigates cause areas that are newer to GiveWell, first examined community-based treatment options for reducing these deaths by treating children with amoxicillin, an inexpensive antibiotic. That approach initially looked promising, but conversations with researchers and implementers indicated that many pneumonia deaths today are caused by infections that amoxicillin doesn’t treat. We then shifted our attention toward another strategy for reducing pneumonia deaths: providing medical oxygen for severely ill children in hospitals. This costs more per patient but targets the children at greatest risk of dying and can also treat diseases beyond pneumonia. If expanding access to medical oxygen proves cost-effective, it could become a new way for GiveWell to help prevent these deaths. Improving our estimates for key cost-effectiveness inputs: Assessing the cost-effectiveness of malaria programs generally requires estimating the number of children who die from malaria in a given place, but that figure is surprisingly uncertain. In many places where we fund programs, cause-of-death data come mainly from interviews with families rather than from health system records. Because malaria symptoms are very similar to symptoms for many other diseases, knowing the symptoms a child was experiencing is often insufficient to determine whether malaria was the cause of death. To more accurately determine the share of deaths caused by malaria, we are developing an approach based on the share of school-aged children infected with malaria (which can be measured accurately using rapid fingerprick tests) and the overall child death rate (measured reliably using large household surveys). We then use the relationship between infection levels and deaths to estimate how many are attributable to malaria. Because this approach is based on data that we think can more reliably assess malaria-specific deaths, we expect it will be better at identifying differences in malaria deaths between regions, which could allow us to target malaria funding to the places where it will do the most good. Developing new tools to increase research capacity: Our cost-effectiveness spreadsheets are often very complex, and errors in their formulas or inputs can meaningfully change our estimate of a program’s cost-effectiveness, which is a key factor in our funding decisions. Research analysts have long vetted these analyses line by line to ensure their accuracy. We recently built an AI tool to assist in that process. Early versions reliably caught errors in formulas but often missed issues a human reviewer would catch, such as outdated data or inconsistent assumptions. To address this, we compiled errors analysts had found in past reviews and refined the tool until it caught more than 90% of them. The tool now serves as a first pass, followed by a research analyst reviewing its findings. As a result, vetting that took as long as a week now takes a few hours. Speeding up this check while maintaining accuracy frees researchers to spend more time on the substantive questions behind our grants. This conversation explores aspects of our research process: building models, engaging with academic experts and implementing organizations, prioritizing the questions most likely to change our minds, and checking our work. This is part of what our researchers do, and we're actively hiring for research roles (https://www.givewell.org/about/jobs) so that we can keep identifying highly cost-effective programs and directing donors’ funds to the programs we think will do the most good. Visit our All Grants Fund (https://www.givewell.org/all-grants-fund) page to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast (https://givewell.transistor.fm/subscribe) for our latest updates. This episode was recorded on September 16, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

2. 

   3 Sept 2026

   Pressure-Testing Our Research as GiveWell Grows

   GiveWell works to continually improve our research so we can make better grant decisions and direct donations where we believe they can do the most good. GiveWell’s Cross-Cutting research subteam is an important part of that effort—it investigates the impact of the programs we fund, works to resolve our largest uncertainties, and aims to improve our research. As GiveWell’s grantmaking grows (https://blog.givewell.org/2026/07/23/scaling-our-impact-with-support/), the Cross-Cutting subteam is strengthening our data collection and analysis to support that growth. In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Program Director Alex Cohen, who leads the Cross-Cutting subteam, about how better data can improve our decision-making, our work to gather stronger evidence, and the ways we’ve tested AI as a tool to increase our research capacity and quality. Elie and Alex discuss: Triangulating multiple data sources to check impact: Directing donations to programs we believe will do the most good requires understanding the impact of the programs we support. Organizations provide us with monitoring data, but we know there are many ways that, despite the best intentions, this data can be biased or incomplete. To address this, we are investing in additional sources and types of data to improve the accuracy of our estimates. For example, in Burkina Faso we’re funding dried-blood tests to better understand whether caregivers are completing the second and third at-home doses of seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), which provides preventive malaria medication. We think this will improve our understanding of how accurate self-reported data is and whether funding to boost coverage of second and third doses of the medication could cost-effectively help people. Setting quality standards for survey data: GiveWell often collects survey data at the end of a program to better understand its impact and answer our open questions, but survey data is prone to error. For example, GiveWell researchers shadowed surveyors in Uganda and Nigeria who worked long days under time pressure, creating conditions where hard-to-access households were more likely to be skipped. Because those households may also be the ones programs are most likely to miss, this could lead to overestimating coverage. We’re working to reduce these errors by investing in more independent data checks, and we’ve developed survey guidelines that include practices like GPS tracking and verifying whether a random sample of households was surveyed. Using AI to critique our work: GiveWell is experimenting with AI tools to increase our research capacity and improve its quality. Our cost-effectiveness models are an important part of our funding decisions, and we carefully vet them to reduce the chance of mistakes. We’ve developed and trained an AI model that, with human oversight, can catch errors that previously required tedious staff review, opening up some capacity for those reviewers to support the team in other ways. We're also experimenting with using AI to critique and identify weaknesses in our research (https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effectiveness/ai-red-teaming-12-25), though we’ve had more limited success with this strategy. By investing in more and better data and experimenting with new tools, we’re working to expand our research capacity while strengthening the rigor of our work as our grantmaking scales. Growing our research team is central to these goals, and GiveWell is actively hiring researchers and program officers. New members of our research team typically start on the Cross-Cutting subteam as part of their onboarding and training. If someone you know might be a good fit, please share our open roles (https://www.givewell.org/about/jobs)! Visit our All Grants Fund (https://www.givewell.org/all-grants-fund) page to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast (https://givewell.transistor.fm/subscribe) for our latest updates. This episode was recorded on August 21, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

3. 

   24 Aug 2026

   Announcing Our Largest Grant to Date

   GiveWell, with co-funding from Coefficient Giving, recently made our largest grant to date: $276 million to the Against Malaria Foundation (https://www.givewell.org/research/grants/Against-Malaria-Foundation-ITN-Campaigns-in-DRC-in-2027-2029-May-2026) (AMF) to support the procurement and distribution of 92 million nets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) from 2027 through 2029. We estimate that the nets, 46 million of which we think would not otherwise be distributed, will avert roughly 67,000 deaths. We have supported AMF’s work for more than 15 years, and the insecticide-treated nets it procures and distributes remain one of the most cost-effective ways we've found to save lives. This grant, which involved a more rigorous investigation process than most, is part of a larger story about scaling our team and systems to handle substantially more funding while deepening our research rigor. Last year, we directed more than $400 million to highly cost-effective programs to save and improve lives and, this year, we expect our grantmaking to approach, and possibly exceed, $1 billion. This increase in grantmaking aims to meet global needs faster and more effectively. In this episode, GiveWell co-founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Alex Bowles about the questions the team set out to answer during the grant investigation. Elie and Alex discuss: Assessing the impact of insecticide-treated nets in DRC: GiveWell usually estimates a program’s cost-effectiveness and impact by analyzing academic evidence, particularly randomized trials, and making a number of adjustments. Because of our growing capacity, we were able to do something new for this grant: We tested our assumptions about DRC’s past net campaigns by drawing on two new, independent lines of evidence. First, we analyzed a recent national survey, which showed a reduction in malaria infections close to what we had predicted. Second, we commissioned a firm based in DRC to interview households and community leaders. Those interviews confirmed records about nets received and provided information about the challenges of conducting net campaigns in DRC. Taken together, this more robust approach increased our confidence that nets work well and are likely to reach intended households in the locations funded by this grant. Planning and coordinating at scale: This grant is nearly three times the size of our previous largest grant (also to AMF) and is concentrated in one country rather than being spread across several. The grant commits funds at the beginning of a multi-year planning cycle, which we think will make these campaigns easier to plan. It also aims to ensure that campaigns happen across all 26 of DRC’s provinces, in some cases on an expedited timeline. This shift in our funding approach makes close coordination with AMF and other partners—including the Global Fund, which is funding much of the net distribution, and the national malaria program—even more important than before. Rethinking how often nets are distributed: In most countries, nets are distributed every three years, but evidence shows that nets wear out more quickly in DRC, in part because of the climate. Our analysis of national survey data, net durability studies, and AMF’s post-distribution monitoring suggests that nets in DRC last roughly 18 to 24 months. DRC had already shortened its campaign cycle, aiming to distribute nets every 30 months. With the support of the government, GiveWell is supporting net campaigns every 24 months in several provinces with high rates of malaria transmission, and funding evidence gathering so we can learn whether more frequent net campaigns is a cost-effective strategy for further reducing malaria rates. We think this approach will help further prevent malaria and potentially save more lives. A larger, more experienced team enabled us to investigate this grant more deeply than we could have even two years ago—looking back at past grants to assess their estimated impact and asking important questions about the challenges of implementing such a large program. The same capacity that allowed us to research this grant, which we expect to save tens of thousands of lives, is also helping us look ahead to newer strategies that could save even more lives in the future. Visit our All Grants Fund (https://www.givewell.org/all-grants-fund) and Top Charities Fund (https://www.givewell.org/top-charities-fund) pages to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast (https://givewell.transistor.fm/subscribe) for our latest updates. This episode was recorded on August 14, 2026, and represents our best understanding at that time.

Who has been a guest on GiveWell Conversations

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Alex Cohen
• Rosie Bettle
• Alex Bowles
• Meika Ball
• Dilhan Perera

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

20 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

20 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 50 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

79

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

51

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Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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