GiveWell has long grappled with fundamental questions about how to value different positive impacts and make funding decisions across diverse programs. In particular, how much more valuable it is to save a life than to substantially improve it? And how can we prioritize between programs that achieve those outcomes in different measures when there’s no “right” answer to that question?
In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld speaks with Senior Program Officer Julie Faller about why GiveWell is dedicating more capacity to researching livelihoods programs that aim to increase people's incomes. They discuss how we're building on existing work, searching for new cost-effective opportunities, and exploring more of the impactful programs we've long cared about.
Elie and Julie discuss:
- A new funding threshold: GiveWell uses a framework of “moral weights” to compare different outcomes across interventions, but they are a necessary tool and not an absolute truth. To account for this, we’re using a different cost-effectiveness threshold for our expanded livelihoods portfolio. This enables us to evaluate and fund programs that would appear as cost-effective as our standard recommendations to a donor who values income gains twice as much as our standard model.
- How we’re expanding our livelihoods work: GiveWell is hiring a dedicated Livelihoods Program Officer to lead a more focused search for impactful livelihoods programs. This increased capacity will allow us to develop a long-term livelihoods strategy, build an expert network, and collaborate directly with implementing organizations to find and co-create promising programs.
- Some areas we plan to explore more deeply: Promising areas for investigation include programs that create positive economic “spillover” benefits for entire communities and community-driven development projects. We’ll also analyze results from our previously funded research on interventions like footbridges and eyeglasses to understand the potential impact these programs could have if scaled.
Our new program officer will lead the search for livelihoods opportunities over the next year that meet our high bar for funding, and we plan to keep growing this research if it proves successful. We’re excited that this expansion of our research team will allow us to explore more of the impactful opportunities that we—and our donors—have long cared about.
Visit our All Grants Fund webpage to learn more about how you can support this work, and listen or subscribe to our podcast for our latest updates.
This episode was recorded on June 25, 2025 and represents our best understanding at that time.
