April 2018: Schistosomiasis Control Initiative

Payout Date: May 1, 2018

Total grants: USD 1,500,000

Number of grantees: 1

In April, I recommended a grant of $1.5 mil from this fund to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI). I followed the rationale laid out in this blog post on the GiveWell website to decide to support SCI as opposed to GiveWell's other top charities.

Your support will enable SCI to reach millions of children with its deworming programs. Thank you!

I also considered holding some funds for:

  • Grant investigations GiveWell is currently working on as part of our Incubation Grants program. These include JPAL's Government Partnership Initiative, grants to Evidence Action Beta (to pilot new programs that could become future GiveWell top charities like No Lean Season) or IDinsight (to support its GiveWell embedded team).
  • Grants to organizations whose primary goal is to raise funds (from other donors) for GiveWell's top charities. For example, One for the World, which has been a volunteer-run organization, is considering seeking funding to hire full-time staff and is considering raising funds for GiveWell top charities, exclusively. My understanding is that other sources of funds for EA community building (i.e., Open Philanthropy or Nick Beckstead's fund) are unlikely to prioritize this type of opportunity.

The above investigations are still in progress, so I decided to grant these funds now instead of holding on to funding until they complete. I expect that, in the event that we complete the above investigations and want to direct funding to the above opportunities, we'll be able to direct funding to them via donors to this fund, Good Ventures' support of GiveWell's Incubation Grants, or other donors.