Elie Hassenfeld: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, this is Elie Hassenfeld. I'm GiveWell's co-founder and CEO. I'm here today with Julie Faller, a Senior Program Officer at GiveWell.

GiveWell is often known for our Top Charities and the recommendations we make there, but over the last few years, our work has become much broader. And so we're gonna talk today about a few ways in which our research work has evolved in the last few years.

We are gonna do a whirlwind tour of some areas of our work—water, vaccines, some research on nutrition, and a focus on increasing people's incomes, that both will give you a sense of the breadth of some of the work that we're doing, but also new ways in which we're approaching that work to deliver more impact in the future.

One quick note is that increasing the breadth of our work is not a goal per se. Instead, we see this increased breadth as allowing us to cover more surface area and, ideally, find more cost-effective [00:01:00] ways to help people. So we're gonna talk about ways that we are looking for additional organizations to potentially support in both water and vaccines, in places where we think we can learn more about the best ways to implement these programs that we've known in the past. And then also supporting research on programs, both at the very basic level to understand the health consequences of anemia, and then on the broader level, ways that we could increase people's incomes more cost effectively.

This conversation will show that some of the ways that GiveWell has evolved are going to help us deliver more impact in the future. We have become more active as a funder, relative to our beginnings when we were relatively more passive. Meaning, when we started, we went to the world and just tried to find the best opportunities we could, and now we're working to shape those opportunities ourself.

We're also thinking a lot about how work we do today can build for the future and create more, larger cost-effective programs for us to support in two years from now, or [00:02:00] three years from now, relative to the set of programs that exist today. And then we're also thinking critically, especially at our larger size, about our place in the philanthropic ecosystem. Where can we support programs that need support because other funders, other actors are not supporting them? And that's a major question that's always on our mind as we do our work.

So, Julie, thanks for joining me and having this conversation today.

Julie Faller: Hi, Elie. Happy to do it.

Elie Hassenfeld: So, let's start with you know, ways in which we try to find potential grantees. I think just to set this up, it'd be really helpful to talk about how this has mostly gone in the past you know, before getting into some of the ways that we have now done this differently.

Julie Faller: Yeah. So, the question is like, how do we identify the organizations that are implementing the programs that we want to fund? And often in the past we did this in a way that more heavily relied on our network. So we would reach out to organizations that we already were aware of, that we knew were implementing programs that we could potentially be interested in funding and kind of work with them to investigate [00:03:00] individual grants that could fund these programs. And it was a pretty, I think, intensive process working with grantees and also like could take a while to get from first starting to work with a grantee to actually making a grant that would allow programs to take place in the world.

Elie Hassenfeld: Yeah. And so how would you say this worked historically? I mean, I think there were like a few different ways that we would bump into or find potential grantees. I mean, once in a while someone would reach out directly to us and that would put them on our radar. Sometimes, you know, we would read research studies and then go looking for an organization implementing that program. Other times through our network. As of two years ago, let's say, what proportion of the grantees we ended up looking into came through those various pathways?

Julie Faller: Yeah, I would say the vast majority of them would be grantees that we heard about, either like through our networks or through looking into particular, kind of like platforms within a space. So there are often convenings of organizations working on, say, maternal neonatal health or something. And that's how we would find out that an org was already working on a particular issue area. And it [00:04:00] was very rare for an org to either reach out to us directly without us soliciting it and have the thing that we wanted to fund, because there isn't always very strong overlap between where research is happening and where we want to fund programs.

Elie Hassenfeld: Right. And so then, I guess a challenge in, or a problem with that approach is that it meant that for organizations that we were somehow connected to, we could learn about them and move forward. But then, there's all these other organizations out there—as of a couple years ago maybe we didn't know very much about them—but then, we wanted to find a way to be more in contact with them and see whether there was something we could do together.

Julie Faller: Right. I think there's both the question of like the organizations that are outside of our network that we don't know them. And then there's also the question of organizations that could do the work that we want to fund, but don't know that there's funding available for it. They're not pitching it to us, because they don't know that we're interested in potentially funding something like that. And because they're not doing that work already, we don't know this org might be well placed to implement this program.

Elie Hassenfeld: So are you distinguishing between, you know, two different kinds of organizations? I mean, [00:05:00] and maybe this is overly simplifying, but there are perhaps, relatively speaking, smaller organizations that primarily do one thing, and then, you know, there the obstacle or the challenge is just learning about them and having them learn about us.

And then, there's a whole different set of organizations, these very large organizations that implement a wide array of programs. So these are organizations perhaps like, CHAI, the Clinton Health Access Initiative; or PATH; or IRC, the International Rescue Committee; and, and many more like them where there's some opportunity for them to decide to take up a program if they know there's interest from donors.

Julie Faller: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think there are some small organizations that are community-based organizations that implement a lot of different programs where they're just trying to serve the place where they work. I don't think it's like always just about size. But I think that that is true, that there are some organizations that are specialized in particular sectors or programming areas that are kind of like gonna do what they're gonna do. And then there are others that are happy to implement different programs if there's funding available for them.

Elie Hassenfeld: Got it. Yeah, why don't you [00:06:00] then just say more about like what we did to try and address this problem and what we found.

Julie Faller: Yeah. So, in the last year or so, we've run a couple different processes to try to basically get the word out that we're interested in funding certain kind of programs and give organizations the opportunity to tell us if they think they can do a program well. And so these are, I guess, in some like grantmaking language is called request for information or request for proposal processes.

And so, one example is with a technology called inline chlorination, or ILC. Basically, the problem is in a lot of places there are water systems, tanked water systems where people can go and get piped water, but the water hasn't been treated. And so it might be available, but it might not be clean. It can have pathogens that cause diarrhea and we think contribute to child death, in particular. And so ILC, it's basically like a little device that you put on the pipe of a tank that dispenses chlorine as the water is being pumped, and it treats the water without the user having to do anything, which is really nice, like our water comes out of the [00:07:00] faucet already treated.

And so we were really interested in funding inline chlorination programs, but we hadn't found many organizations that were already doing it, or we weren't sure if there was much like appetite from organizations to potentially implement this program. And especially in places where we think diarrhea and other waterborne illnesses is particularly high. So especially the kind of countries where we wanted to fund these programs.

Elie Hassenfeld: And just to clarify like, at the starting point there was basically one organization that was doing this, that we were working with, Evidence Action. And so we, sort of like started on this program via them and, I don't know if this is exactly right, but sort of saw it as the program they were implementing, that we were supporting them to deliver.

Julie Faller: Right. Yeah, and then we kind of like ran up against the challenge that that one organization can't be everywhere, all at once, scaling this technology everywhere. And also, we ran up against the challenge that in the programs that Evidence Action had been implementing ILC, it turns out, there are just like technical issues with this technology. You need to adjust the [00:08:00] little device for the tank that it's on, and make sure that the distribution of chlorine is appropriate for it—these kind of like technical hurdles. And so the scaling for the programs that we had funded wasn't going as quickly as we hoped. And we had a question of, is it possible to try different models to be able to you know, adapt the technology and implement it in different kinds of locations?

Elie Hassenfeld: So there's this big problem, which is, there's access to water that's unclean and that can make people sick and young children die. There's this program, inline chlorination, that treats the water and therefore improves health because the water is cleaner. We're supporting one organization in a few countries to deliver this program, and they, I mean, understandably, were not in a position to try and scale this program up simultaneously in so many different countries where this seemingly very, or potentially very impactful program could be delivered and really help people a great deal.

Julie Faller: That's right, yeah. And so this last [00:09:00] year, our water team ran a request for proposals process where they kind of like outlined the problem, the technology, what do we know about ILC, and the kinds of programs that we might be interested in funding. And we went through kind of a stage process, looked at the most promising ones, and got full proposals from these organizations. And I think there are a couple things about it that are really cool.

So, one of it is that we learned about organizations, including organizations based in the African countries that they serve, that weren't on our radar at all before. So these organizations sort of raised their hands and said, we think we can implement this program well in the communities we serve, and we wouldn't have known about these orgs to make the grants.

Another thing that I think is really cool about this is that, as I mentioned, we have all these questions about like, what is the best way to implement ILC? Are there different program models that can make the program work better; make sure that the chlorination happens; make sure that the community is okay with the taste of chlorine and understands the purpose of it within the water? All these kinds of things that accrue program impact. Like is the [00:10:00] program working the way you want?

And so what's nice about funding all of these different pilots is that we're able to test different program models at the same time, and we can kind of look and see how are they functioning, what seems to be working well, what seems to be challenges across the whole set of investments all at once. It kind of speeds up our learning and hopefully will help us figure out what program models are most effective. And so these are short-term pilots, 12 to 18 months, and then we hope to fund programs at scale afterwards, based on what works.

Elie Hassenfeld: What would success look like in this area three years from now? You know, how many organizations do you think we might be supporting and at what scale?

Julie Faller: That's a good question. I don't have like a point of view about that because I think we could either decide like, here's the organization that can do this really well, and we want to help them do it in the high burden areas in the places where waterborne disease is a real big problem and like fund them to scale.

Or we could decide like, hey, it turns out that context org fit really matters. Let's fund each of the organizations in the [00:11:00] places where they're particularly well suited to do it and, you know, end up funding a bunch of different organizations.

And then I think it's also possible that we'll find out that inline chlorination is just not quite ready for scale yet. That the technology is still a bit too finicky and that we need to do more work supporting the development of it before we end up scaling up.

Elie Hassenfeld: Right, like one of the things that seems especially valuable about this one particular part of our work is we're able to look at one program delivered in many different contexts by many different organizations.

And then, you know, we can learn a lot about the program and its potential by having that breadth of view and that can teach us about, yeah, like you said, the promise of the program overall. Also the optimal way to move forward with funding in a way that sometimes is like quite hard when we're only looking at one organization, delivering one program in one location.

Julie Faller: Right, yeah. And then I'll just say that the last thing that I think is kind of cool about this set of work is that we are also working with an [00:12:00] organization where one of their founders helped develop the technology. And she's going to be working across the whole set of grants with all of the implementers so that when they run into these technical challenges, you know, what do we do if there's a tank where the flow through rate is higher than the device is designed for? She'll be able to provide them with like advice on how to troubleshoot. And so we think that having that like built in technical support will also hopefully let the programs have a greater chance of success than they would if they were trying to do it on their own.

Elie Hassenfeld: Can you just for context, like rattle off some of the countries or sort of the breadth of scope of these pilots?

Julie Faller: So, we have pilots across several different countries, including Somalia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Chad. So these countries are all places where diseases that are transmitted by water are a big problem. There also include some contexts which are more considered like humanitarian contexts, as well as some contexts that are less secure than others where we [00:13:00] had been funding Evidence Action in the past. And so we're hopeful that by reaching these more difficult to serve areas, the programs might actually be more impactful.

Elie Hassenfeld: Why do you think that more organizations weren't implementing ILC, you know, inline chlorination before? It's a little bit surprising that you have this big problem, there's this clear solution. Obviously, the technology is challenging, it's not fully worked out. But why wouldn't it be the case that organizations would independently know about and start trying to implement these effective programs?

Julie Faller: I read that the water space, a lot of the funding is concentrated around trying to get access to water. Whether that's, you know, through wells, or boreholes, or through trying to get them piped water systems, and there's just a lot less focus on water quality or treatment overall.

Elie Hassenfeld: And then what do you make of that? It seems like we have a different perspective on the most cost-effective approach to water. And what do you think others are missing, or what are we missing, and where do you think we [00:14:00] disagree with the… or maybe it's just that they're coming at it from a different angle, but I don't know. What's your take on that?

Julie Faller: Yeah. I think what they would say is that the GiveWell model is less sustainable. Because basically what we're saying is, you know, chlorine is a commodity where you need to buy it and keep buying it, like it works in the water that it treats. And then we're saying we want to pay to keep treating the water. And for people to have access to that treated water without having to pay.

And I think for other funders, whether because of a budget that they're allocating differently, or because they think that it's the appropriate role for government, or you know, yeah, different other, kinda like philosophical bents, I think they want to fund programs that they believe are more catalytic, or investments that they think are more durable.

Elie Hassenfeld: Right. That makes sense. Okay, so, you know, one area where we did this was in water. I think we've also done some of this work in vaccinations. So maybe you could just talk a little bit about that.

Julie Faller: Yeah. The vaccinations programs that we were interested in [00:15:00] potentially funding coming out of this process, were focused on the area that we're calling demand generation. So basically that's about like making people want to access vaccines that are already available in the system. And so we were focused especially on outreach programs.

So basically the idea behind these programs is most vaccines are delivered in clinics. You know, people bring their child in, they get their routine shots, and that's sort of how most vaccines are administered. But there are communities that are really far from healthcare clinics, where it's just like, quite costly for the families to be able to bring their children in. And those more remote communities tend to have higher prevalence of children who haven't received their vaccines, because it's harder to access the clinic.

And so outreach services are basically like, you know, you take the vaccinator, you take the vaccines, and you bring them closer to the community where people aren't accessing vaccines, whether it's like a door-to-door campaign, or you just go to a central spot and let everybody know the vaccinator will be there then.

And so, I think governments do fund these kinds of services to some extent, but [00:16:00] they tend to be expensive, because you have to pay for the gas, you have to pay for the people. And so we think that they're under-provided, relative to what would be optimal, especially for places that have very high prevalence of unvaccinated children.

Elie Hassenfeld: And I think something that's just been the case for GiveWell looking at vaccination programs historically is that, you know, when GiveWell first got started, we looked at things in, sort of a fairly direct way, you know, are there opportunities to pay for the vaccines that people need? And, thankfully, there's a group named Gavi that funds many of the vaccines that people need. And so the opportunities to purchase vaccines in the way that GiveWell funds purchase, say malaria nets, you know, we didn't find them.

But we still observe the reality that there are many children who are not getting the vaccines that they should get. And so, this is an attempt to, you know, say like in order for a child to get a vaccine, we need two things to be true. You know, both the vaccines need to be available and the family needs [00:17:00] to want to access them. And, we've found, or we believe that there are more opportunities to use money to increase vaccination rates by supporting the “demand side" than the “supply side.”

Julie Faller: That's right, as you're saying, so Gavi is supporting the procurement of vaccines. Governments are largely paying for healthcare workers to actually administer the vaccines. But this question of what happens for the children who are in places that are really far from those services, that's the question that outreach services are trying to address.

So the vaccines team is still kind of looking at the proposals that we've received so far from the request for proposals we did for this, and they're actually likely to put another round to request more proposals to a larger group of organizations in the coming year. So far, we've funded one grant from this that will fund these outreach services in a state called Kebbe in Nigeria that has a high portion of unvaccinated children.

Elie Hassenfeld: And do you think the broader set of knowledge we'll gain from this will be [00:18:00] similar to what we discussed in the water case? Meaning, it's a combination of potential opportunities to scale up promising programs with more funding, some degree of understanding of you know, the most promising approaches, some of the challenges that could be brought elsewhere. What could this do for GiveWell's impact in, you know, say, two or three years from now?

Julie Faller: Yeah, I think there will be sort of similar learnings. One thing that's really great that the team is planning is across any of these programs that we fund, we're gonna do baseline and endline coverage surveys to sort of understand what were the vaccination rates in the programs before the outreach services started, what were they afterward? And will that help us get a sense of the magnitude of impact?

This is important because there have been a couple randomized controlled trials trying to look at like, how much do you increase vaccines when you take them closer to the communities? There's sort of the commonsensical intuition that like, this should work, right? Like people should take something up when it's easier to get to. But communities [00:19:00] just look really different across the world in terms of like, how much are you making it easier to bring an outreach service here?

There's also different kind of policy questions around you know, like what do vaccinators do if they encounter a child who's slightly outside of the age window in which they're supposed to be vaccinated? There are these kind of like operational questions of have you trained vaccinators on the appropriate policy? And so all of those kind of contextual and operational questions mean that we can have a guess of what we think the program impacts will be, but we're not really sure. And so having that kind of pre/post evidence will help us triangulate against the guess, be able to say, where are the kinds of places where this program would be impactful and highly cost-effective in the future?

Elie Hassenfeld: So I guess I have a similar question to the one we talked about with water. Why aren't others funding this? Vaccines are sort of the paradigmatic, cheap, effective, evidence-backed way to improve health. Why are we the ones funding, or potentially funding demand, [00:20:00] and not someone else, you know, Gavi or another funder?

Julie Faller: I think the main reason is that outreach sessions, relatively speaking, are expensive. And governments do them sometimes, but not a lot of them. And so, I think that there is just this question of funds that are doing something that can be seen as supplementary to the main system of clinics.

Elie Hassenfeld: And so when you say expensive, presumably you mean expensive on a like per person basis. But of course, we're also taking expense into account, we're looking at it from a cost-effectiveness lens, you know, what's the cost relative to the impact? I don't know, like do you think that is, playing a role? Is… I mean this is probably an over oversimplification, but do you think it is plausible that we're saying, yes, this is costly on a per person reached basis, but the impact we might see, you know, therefore we want to try and get the data, is very strong in a cost per health impact achieved.

And then someone else, or the government might be looking at a program and say, this is very expensive to reach each [00:21:00] person. We're already paying a lot for this program. We don't want to do more. That doesn't feel like a very generous framing to the government. And so I'm curious, how do you see it?

Julie Faller: So, I think governments have a lot of considerations, appropriately, I think outside of just like cost-effectiveness of their investments. And something like an outreach session is going to be targeted to particular communities, the communities maybe that need it most. But it's not clear if that's like meeting a government priority, if the priority might be something like services that anybody can access, versus services that only a particular geography accesses.

Another thing about these outreach sessions is that you know, in our view, they do need to be targeting communities that have like a sizable chunk of children who aren't otherwise going to be vaccinated to be a cost-effective investment. And so that just means that as you're targeting gets more kind of like specific, like you're really narrowed down to those communities that have a high number of [00:22:00] unvaccinated children, your cost-effectiveness increases, but that also means that less of the population is being targeted with that particular you know, lever.

Elie Hassenfeld: So these are two areas, you know, water and vaccines that GiveWell has done some substantial work on over the last few years. I wonder if there's any way to quantify or, or maybe just offer some qualitative take on, in the future, how big could you imagine these areas are for GiveWell?

Julie Faller: Yeah, we also just added a grant to help with the monitoring and evaluation, the data collection for the water pilots that I was just telling you about. And so when we were thinking about that grant, we were asking a question of how much funding could this potentially influence? And so we think this could affect about $170 million in potential scale up funding. That's just for ILC programs. That's over a multi-year time horizon, but that gives you a sense of what we think we could be scaling up there.

Elie Hassenfeld: This [00:23:00] work… there's a few things like one, it might just lead us to allocate funds in water more cost-effectively in the very short term. A second thing it does is helps us learn about—and not just us, but hopefully the world—about how to implement water programs more effectively, or this particular one more effectively. And then finally, as we look to the future, we say, well, you know, there's some possibility that we'll have more funding to direct in the future, certainly we hope we will. And this is putting us in a position to deliver those additional funds really well by learning more about this space that has opportunity to scale up, you know, sort of in GiveWell terminology that could have a great deal of room for more funding in the future.

Julie Faller: That's right.

Elie Hassenfeld: Just like zooming out on this for a second, we're talking about running these requests for proposals or requests for information, why did we do this now? Why didn't we do it before?

Julie Faller: Yeah, it's a great question because I think as you're saying, this is not an innovation by any means, and I think that there are a couple different things.

One is that I think that [00:24:00] our teams that are working within sectors have spent the last couple of years developing like pretty strong points of views of what are the kind of programs that we're particularly interested in funding. And now they're able to articulate that in a way where they feel like organizations, even if they're not that familiar with GiveWell, can engage with our process.

Whereas, in the past, I think when we had a smaller team, and maybe had, had a little bit more trouble communicating what we were looking for, because our funding decisions always end up being really dependent on specifics. And so, being able to kind of like have a frame where we can communicate the like intuition underlying that specificity, well enough that organizations that don't know GiveWell can engage with it and give us the information we need, I think took our team a little bit of time to develop.

Elie Hassenfeld: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, another experience that I remember is we've run a couple of these historically, and it is effectively impossible to sort through applications in areas that we [00:25:00] don't already know very well, because you get such limited information and you don't even know what questions to ask. And so each application becomes a giant research project.

And what we're talking about here is reaching the point where we can narrow the scope of what we are going to consider to inline chlorination pilots in some set of countries or demand generation activities for vaccination. We knew enough that we were in a position to evaluate applications, and I think that, that seems to me just hearing you talk, it's like another reason that we reached a point now with a larger staff, some of whom had more specialized expertise in various areas where we could do this and gain from it.

Julie Faller: Yeah, I agree with that.

Elie Hassenfeld: Let's move to another area where we're doing things that are somewhat new. And this is the area of funding research. So GiveWell obviously relies on a lot of research to support our decision making. We've supported research for many years but have been doing a lot more supporting of research in the past couple of years. And so let's talk about like one area where we're funding research and what you think it means for GiveWell's work going [00:26:00] forward.

Julie Faller: Yeah, so as you say, like we have funded research for a long time. We're doing it more and we're taking a broader view of, what are the kinds of research questions that we think our funding can help address, and also what are the kinds of research designs that we're willing to help support?

So one example that I think is kind of interesting is a study that we funded to try to help understand how bad is anemia, and like do our current estimates of its burden map at all to where people are actually suffering because of anemia? And so I guess as a little bit of background, anemia is low hemoglobin, which is the thing that carries oxygen in your blood. And it turns out that the way that public health groups are trying to estimate who has either mild, or moderate, or severe anemia is just based on kind of like population level data about the distribution of hemoglobin levels. This is kind of just [00:27:00] unrelated to anything about how does the person actually function? Like what does it mean to have low hemoglobin in their day-to-day life?

Okay, so this is a problem because we're trying to direct iron supplementation and fortification programs to the places where we think anemia is really a problem. And so that means that you might be like funding supplementation to people who either aren't experiencing actual downsides in their life because of their low hemoglobin. Or conversely, you might be thinking that there's no problem somewhere where somebody is like slightly above the threshold but actually has impaired functioning because they're not getting enough iron.

Elie Hassenfeld: And the sort of core belief that we start with today, based on what we've been able to see, is that anemia is a widespread problem, that because of how many people suffer from it and the way in which we can support the delivery of iron to people who might need it, this could be a very cost-effective program. But getting more honed in on where is it a problem and to what extent could have a big effect on where we direct [00:28:00] funds and the impact that we're able to have.

Julie Faller: That's right, yeah. And so basically what this study does that we directed funding to, it's going to be implemented in Bangladesh, and taking people who have been identified as having low hemoglobin and treating them with basically iron supplementation. And then giving them a battery of questionnaires like, were you actually experiencing fatigue? And not only just fatigue, but also things like, you know, strength, and kind of physical functioning, cognitive tests. And so we're gonna look at this population, you know, when people do or do not have hemoglobin levels at a certain level, and then be able to map that to, how does that translate to their actual functioning?

Elie Hassenfeld: And so like something very surprising about this, I mean it’s surprising to me, but I imagine surprising to people listening to this, is anemia is a well-known phenomenon. You know, we probably all know people in our personal lives who have suffered from anemia. Like, don't we know how bad anemia is? [00:29:00] Or like, why don't we know more about how it is? And how could it be the case that there's GiveWell that is the institution that needs to direct funding to better understand this, and like why is it not already understood or…

And I just think this is a, kind of a wild fact about the world that there's just like much less known about the problems that affect people than I think many people would believe we know. This fact has influenced us historically, like relatively more towards lifesaving programs because, well, that's knowable if a program that you support is reducing deaths of young children, that's measurable. And then something like this, how bad is anemia for quality of life? Well, that's harder to know, therefore, we actually know much less. And because of the way that we work and what we're trying to do, we become the group that is most interested in getting that information.

Julie Faller: Yeah, I think that's right. And then another thing that's interesting is even once we sort of have a sense for anemia, we're like, okay, great, now we have a sense of hemoglobin levels and how they map to these, you know, real life outcomes like fatigue and [00:30:00] strength. We won't be able to compare that to other quality of life programs because they might have their own measurement issues, or we will have questions about the comparisons.

Elie Hassenfeld: Let's talk about one other example of research that we're doing, which is working GiveDirectly, the organization that delivers cash transfers, on variations to their program that could be more cost effective. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what we're doing there and what we hope.

Julie Faller: So GiveDirectly their kind of basic program delivers unconditional cash transfers to recipients. And so the idea is you find very poor people and you give them money, and they you know, spend it the way that they want to.

And what we have funded them to do is to look at some variations that we think might make the impact higher, and thus be more cost effective. So, three different variations we're looking at. One of them is pairing business grants with the household transfers. So the question is like, if you give people who are running businesses in the area a grant, around the time that the local economy is about to get this big [00:31:00] infusion of cash, is there this kind of, you know, mutually beneficial cycle where the businesses are poised to be able to take advantage of the additional cash in their environment. And for that one, we're piggybacking off of an existing randomized control trial that's happening in Malawi. So we'll have this experimental evidence of looking at the business grants versus the standard program.

And then we're also looking at a couple other ones. So one of those variations is looking if we can target the poorest young adults, so basically just like those people who are most likely to benefit from the program. And if that will make them invest more, like take a bigger chunk of their transfer and put it into a productive investment.

And then the last one is looking if when you do the infusion of cash, if you also add a footbridge to the community if that could be beneficial. So the idea there is that these are communities that are like, kinda like cut off from the broader market…

Elie Hassenfeld: Cut off by some waterway, that prevents them from getting where they need to get to. And so [00:32:00] a footbridge enables them to pass that waterway more easily and they can travel.

Julie Faller: Right, exactly. So like there are a lot of communities that, especially seasonally, like during the rainy season, maybe this area you can't get through it. Or maybe it's like really hilly, so you can't go all the way down and all the way up. And a footbridge helps with that. And so the idea is like, well, what do people do with money? They spend it in markets. And so having greater access to the villages or other market towns that are on the other side of the bridge might make the transfers more beneficial.

Elie Hassenfeld: Yeah. This is great. Well thank you so much, Julie. This was a whirlwind tour through a lot of areas of work that we're doing.
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Elie Hassenfeld: This is Elie again. When GiveWell started, we were clearly a passive grant maker. That means we were going to the world, looking at what existed, and then trying to support the programs that we thought were the most cost effective. We're doing a lot more active grant making now, meaning, we're going to the world and saying, we would like to see this program exist that doesn't. We would like to see more [00:33:00] inline chlorination. We would like to explore the possibility of variations on cash transfers. I think that's really great and I think it's a way that we're able to use some of the expertise that we've built up over our 18-year history to deliver more impact.

Another big topic on our minds that you see come through here is building for the future. We're hopeful that we will continue to direct significant funding in the future, that we'll direct even more funding in the future than we have in the past. And with that in mind, we're building for the future with the work that we're doing today, that's supporting research that will influence our future grant making, supporting pilots that could lead to more and better grantmaking in the future. And all of that has an eye on, ensuring, or enabling future GiveWell to be even more effective and cost effective than current GiveWell.

Then a final thing that I think really comes through here is what is GiveWell's place in the philanthropic and charitable ecosystem? You know, we're always asking, is this a fit for us or is it better for someone else? And we're really keying in here on areas where we see an important [00:34:00] need that is not being filled by another funder. And those are areas where we are particularly excited.

Thank you all as always for listening and for your support. You can support GiveWell via the donate page on our website. And as always, if you have any questions, please reach out to us directly.