GiveWell’s response to global health funding cuts

This blog post has an overview of what GiveWell has been doing this year in response to Trump administration cuts:

In early 2025, the US government froze billions of dollars in foreign aid, affecting millions of people around the world and creating substantial uncertainty that continues to ripple through health and development programs.

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So far this year, we’ve made 98 grants, 23 of which directly address urgent and cost-effective needs created by the funding cuts. These grants represent around $39 million—just over 10 percent of the total funds we expect to direct this year. However, most of our research and the programs we fund have been affected by the cuts in some way.

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In order to have the greatest impact, we’ve focused our response to the funding cuts on addressing the most cost-effective opportunities we find rather than trying to replace lost funding more generally.

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For example, in April 2025 we provided funding guarantees for seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) campaigns in Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, and Togo.

SMC is only delivered during a specific period each year when malaria transmission is highest (generally July to October). The campaigns require careful planning and preparation on a specified timeline to ensure that the drugs are ready to distribute during that window. The funding freeze that started in January jeopardized 2025 SMC campaigns in several countries because of the disruption to funding for pre-campaign planning activities. GiveWell guaranteed funding for those pre-campaign activities and campaigns themselves for certain countries if US government funds didn’t return.

[…] We provided some funding for pre-campaign activities in six countries and provided partial funding for the SMC campaign itself in one country, as the others had their US government funding reinstated in time. We think that some of those campaigns may not have taken place without our backstop support. […]

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… [W]e have made some grants for programs where funding had been discontinued, and others to ensure that newly unfunded program elements related to our grants received necessary support. The latter was the case with our recent grant to Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) to support the distribution of 4.4 million insecticide-treated nets in Ituri province, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to prevent malaria. AMF typically procures the nets while relying on partners to fund the distribution. The nets for this campaign were procured through a GiveWell grant in December 2024, but no other funder committed to funding distribution logistics. In the absence of partner funding, this grant will cover all distribution costs including shipping, warehousing, distributor training, and household delivery. We estimate the campaign in Ituri […] will avert 5,700 additional deaths.

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In other cases, distribution systems and personnel were available […] but funding for needed supplies was discontinued.

• GiveWell approved a grant to the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) to quickly procure and ship three million malaria rapid diagnostic tests (mRDTs) to public sector clinics in Nigeria. The goal of the grant is to reduce stockouts due to procurement and shipping delays that were caused by funding cuts.

• GiveWell approved a grant to PATH to purchase and ship approximately three months’ worth of injectable artesunate to Mozambique. Injectable artesunate is the first-line treatment for severe malaria, and we expect stock levels will start running low around December 2025 owing to reduced funding from the President’s Malaria Initiative for shipments.

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Funding for a number of global health trials was discontinued after research had started, making it unlikely that the research could be completed and potentially wasting time and effort. GiveWell closed several emergency funding gaps to ensure that this critical research continued as planned. For example:

• GiveWell recommended two grants to Population Services International (PSI) to complete the final round of physical and chemical durability testing on insecticide-treated nets distributed in Cameroon and Nigeria and to publish the findings. The first two survey rounds in both countries were funded by the President’s Malaria Initiative, which experienced significant funding cuts, and we believe that the final survey would not have been completed without GiveWell funding.

• In March 2025, GiveWell recommended a grant to Johns Hopkins University to fill an emergency funding gap for an ongoing randomized trial of the Cholera Hospital-Based Intervention for 7 Days (CHoBI7) in Bangladesh, following USAID’s termination of funding. At the point at which the grant was terminated, the trial had been running for six months; GiveWell funding will allow the research to be completed as originally planned.

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[F]unding has been cut for key sources of global health data, such as the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program […]. To ensure we have access to reliable, accurate data, GiveWell has been coordinating with other global health partners and making grants.

For example, in August 2025, GiveWell recommended a grant to the Johns Hopkins CA CODE (Child and Adolescent Causes of Death Estimation) team to produce state-level estimates of causes of death for children under five in Nigeria from 2000 to 2024. Nigeria receives substantial GiveWell funding across multiple states and health interventions, and we rely on cause-specific mortality estimates when evaluating these different programs.

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[…] GiveWell is developing a clearer picture of the impact of the cuts so we are prepared to respond effectively in the years ahead. Here are a few examples of this work:

• Learning grants. In April, we approved a grant to Results for Development to assess how US government funding cuts are impacting key parts of the vaccine delivery system in DRC, Madagascar, and Nigeria. This research addresses a critical lack of information about the real-world consequences of the cuts on vaccine delivery, including the effects on vaccinators, fixed-site and outreach sessions, supply chains, and data systems. We expect the findings to influence GiveWell’s vaccines strategy by providing qualitative updates to help us manage existing grants and prioritize future funding.