This year, we added two new top charities, Evidence Action’s No Lean Season program and Helen Keller International’s vitamin A supplementation program, and retained our seven top charities from 2016. We also added Evidence Action’s Dispensers for Safe Water program to our list of standout charities.

We recommend that donors give to GiveWell for granting to top charities at our discretion so that we can direct the funding to the top charity or charities with the most pressing funding need. For donors who prefer to give directly to our top charities, we recommend giving 70 percent of your donation to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) and 30 percent to the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI) to maximize your impact. We expect Good Ventures, a foundation with which we work closely, to provide significant support to each top charity; our recommendation to give to AMF and SCI is based on how much good we believe additional donations can do.

We now have nine top charities. They are:

  • Against Malaria Foundation
  • Schistosomiasis Control Initiative
  • Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program
  • Evidence Action’s Deworm the World Initiative
  • Helen Keller International (HKI)’s vitamin A supplementation (VAS) program
  • Sightsavers’ deworming program
  • END Fund’s deworming program
  • Evidence Action’s No Lean Season program
  • GiveDirectly

Overall, we believe our top charities are able to absorb more funding than they could in previous years. This is a result both of recent additions to the top charities list with large funding gaps (particularly Malaria Consortium) as well as expansion by top charities that have been on the list for a longer time (particularly Deworm the World and AMF).

Read the full list of top charities and why they were chosen on blog.givewell.org.