Coefficient Giving is raising its 2026 allocation to GiveWell’s recommendations from $175m to $1b
GiveWell committed $418m in 2025 and has already committed over $400m in 2026
Jack Lewars asks where other donors should give now
GWWC - The effective giving ecosystem moved ~$2b in 2025, up roughly 60% on 2024, across a network of more than 70 organisations
Two funders drove most of it - Coefficient Giving grew ~50% to ~$1b and GiveWell ~100% to ~$490m
The rest of the ecosystem grew ~50%, from ~$340m to ~$490m
Founders Pledge has increased from ~$25m in 2022 to ~$180m in 2025
Giving Green tripled to ~$30m
National fundraising organisations raised ~$64m between them, up 45%
Intercept - a $500m fund to end respiratory infections
There were 12.8b respiratory infections globally in 2021, costing an estimated $600b a year in lost productivity, about 0.6% of global GDP
OpenAI Foundation have launched an AI Resilience programme with over $130m in grants being finalised, more than $1b expected across programmes over the next year
Nick Laing - Never born, then maybe died twice
Todd Moss - More evidence won’t save development - RCTs aren’t built for the questions that actually move ministers
The US restarted $600m in stalled Gavi funding after the State Department retook the lead on the vaccine alliance
Ideas in Development - Has development economics lost its way? - Rachel Glennerster argues aid should go deep on evidence backed programmes in fewer countries and sectors rather than spreading thin
Our World in Data - Writer
1Day Sooner - Program Director, Clinical Trial Abundance
AIM - Incubation Programme applications open this month
Evidence Action - AI Access Initiative
Coefficient Giving - RFP on global health and wellbeing in an era of transformative AI, $10-30m, closes 21 August
Recruiters, researchers and various types of program officers
Probably Good Job Board
Chinese infrastructure and energy investment in Africa nearly tripled to a record $33.5b in H1 2026
World Bank - The July income classifications moved six countries up
Vietnam, the Philippines, Micronesia, Sri Lanka and Jordan all moved to upper-middle income
Togo moved from low to lower-middle income (because of population statistics)
Following the release of detailed results from the 2022 census, the country’s population estimate was reduced by 11.7%. A smaller population produces a higher per capita GDP figure
Yaw - Special economic zones are not cheat codes. Roughly 60% fail to generate incremental activity
Mamo Mihretu - Ethiopia’s reforms show how you reform matters as much as what you reform
Gold exports jumped from ~$200m to ~$4b, reserves rose sixfold and inflation returned to single digits after 2024 exchange rate liberalisation
Stefan Dercon - Growth depends on elite bargains as much as sound policy
Rohit Shinde - India’s agriculture theory of everything - 42% of the labour force produces 16% of GDP
Semafor - the US will permanently end PEPFAR funding for South Africa, closing out most programmes by 30 September 2026
Asterisk - what's the state of PEPFAR now?
Unlock Aid - After USAID, who shapes what comes next?
Devex - South Sudan's new $166m health deal with the US commits Washington to $146m over three years and Juba to $20m
Dean Karlan and Rachel Glennerster - We’re calling for radical simplification
Astral Codex Ten - Breakdown in Pakistan
Foreign funding converts voluntary community organisations into professional NGO contractors, hollowing out the social trust that made them work
Of 20 Pakistani civil society organisations receiving foreign aid, none could mobilise local volunteers or raise significant local funding
Africa Jobs Fund - The third wave of American philanthropy could send ~$5b a year in new giving to Sub-Saharan Africa
Deena Mousa
Google DeepMind - Measuring AI-assisted learning in Sierra Leone
Students gained 0.258 SD in maths over eight weeks, roughly 1.2-1.7 years of typical progress
Rethink Priorities - AI is a double-edged sword for development
Anthropic - An Economic Policy Framework setting out responses across three unemployment scenarios, backed by a $200m research fund and a $150m early-career fellowship
Amazon applied to build its first African satellite ground station in Kenya, taking on Starlink
How South Africans use AI - Work related conversations are over 16% of AI use across Africa against a 13.5% global average, with users treating it as a productivity multiplier
Africa Jobs Fund
The case for international labour mobility
Why the poorest countries send the fewest migrants
OWID
Half of Nigeria’s population now lives in cities, up from about 10% in 1950
A new interactive migration tool maps where the world’s ~280m migrants were born and where they now live
The first new TB vaccine in a century is heading to mass production at the Serum Institute on a $100m+ investment
In Development - The mystery of short Indian children - Indian children are shorter than Sub-Saharan African peers despite higher incomes, and the evidence points to sanitation
Uganda was declared Ebola-free
OWID
CGD - What we are learning about lead in 2026
Food may be the single biggest exposure pathway, with battery recycling the largest single contributor
VoxDev - Air pollution is the world’s leading environmental health risk, its burden falling overwhelmingly on low- and middle-income countries
GiveWell - A podcast on diarrheal disease in DR Congo and South Sudan, which still kills over 400,000 under-fives a year
Kenya plans to become the first African nation to sell citizens’ data, calling it a ‘strategic national asset’
Journal of Democracy - How aspiring autocrats exit - Of 27 instances of democratic erosion since 1999, only Nicaragua and Venezuela ended in consolidated authoritarianism
Alexander Kustov - Why evidence-based policymaking is overrated
China-Africa trade hit a record $275b in 2024, Africa exported $93b against $182b of imports
The Africa Report - Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire agreed to harmonise cocoa farm-gate prices, reviving their ‘cocoa OPEC’
The two produce ~60% of world cocoa
Kenya is nearing a critical-minerals deal with the US to process copper, graphite, lithium and nickel in country
The Bureau of African Affairs’ new US-Africa Strategic Investment Program invites organisations to compete for grants, up to $50m each, out of a budget of $500m
The Iran war hit Gulf remittances, with Kenya’s central bank reporting an 18% month-on-month drop in April
30m foreign workers in the Gulf sent home about $124b in 2024, roughly matching FDI into Africa
World Bank - Approved a $750m budget-support operation for Kenya
Rwanda secured a $250m IMF credit facility
Nigerian pension assets rose 31% year-on-year to $22.6b as domestic-equity holdings more than doubled
S&P Global is acquiring a Nigerian ratings agency
Jishnu Das - The new research on mental health and poverty finds cash transfers move mental health by 0.07 SD on average
Oliver Kim - A brief deep history of literacy - States adopted mass education decades before industrialising, usually in response to social unrest
Oliver Hanney & Rafe Meager - Aggregating evidence - Empirical social science is a balance of probabilities, not proof from single papers
VoxDev
A J-PAL playbook on how AI can put 20 years of development evidence to work
The informal sector accounts for 30-90% of developing-country labour forces
CNBC Africa - Dangote Refinery plans a September IPO aiming to raise $5b at up to a $50b valuation, set to be Africa’s largest ever
Bloomberg - African EV startup Spiro raised $270m to expand battery-swapping across DR Congo, Ethiopia, Malawi and Mali
Realistic Optimist - Bamboo built the rails letting Nigerian retail investors buy US and Nigerian equities for the first time
ExxonMobil’s $30b gas project could lift Mozambique’s economy 4%+ a year, adding up to $150b in tax revenue over 30 years
In Development - Jakarta’s remarkable urban transit - Nearly 90% of residents now have access to bus rapid transit or trains, up from under 20% in 2015
DR Congo drew more than $200m in telecom tower investment, with over 70m mobile subscriptions
Algeria, Niger and Nigeria broke ground on the 4,128km Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline, intended to pump 30 bcm of gas to Europe
Africa’s renewable projects are stalling because the sovereign-ceiling rule ties project creditworthiness to national ratings
World Bank - Gas flaring hit a 6-year high in 2025 - 167 billion cubic metres burned, worth an estimated $54b
Hannah Ritchie - The EV fleet transition lags sales - One in four new cars sold globally was electric in 2025, but only 14% of cars on China’s roads are
Good Science Project - Making our own luck - analysing 18m biomedical papers found signals of transformative discoveries appear about five years ahead
Works in Progress - What’s new in biology
Retatrutide cut body weight ~28%, matching bariatric surgery
An in-vivo CRISPR therapy cut hereditary angioedema attacks 87% from a single injection
Matt Clancy - An atlas of innovation offers the first framework mapping innovation policy mechanisms
Renaissance Philanthropy - Agentic philanthropy - LLMs are good at generating candidate interventions for experts to sift, and poor at implementation judgement
GiveDirectly’s Nick Allardice on the absorption problem - The sector can’t absorb the money at the effectiveness and scale the moment demands
Fortify Health’s Tony Senanayake on how the $1b grant to GiveWell changes who gets funded
Habiba Banu - Spiro is 2.5 years in, having reached 5,900+ people with TB preventive medicine
AIM is winding down its Founding to Give programme after two cohorts
GiveWell is casting a wider net for cost-effective programmes, standing up an ‘areas research’ subteam to look beyond malaria and water treatment
Ken Opalo - A book review of Studwell’s How Africa Works
In Development - Numbers Man on Robert McNamara’s two legacies, Vietnam and the World Bank
Fried ambition - Small grants that push people into already-saturated informal trades redistribute poverty rather than reduce it
People worldwide more satisfied with their freedom in life
Global hunger fell for a third straight year to 7.8% of the world, or 645m people, down from 8.6% in 2022
Electricity access rose from 84% to 92% between 2010 and 2024, with the number without power falling from 1.1b to 655m
World Bank - Mission 300 has connected over 50m people to electricity across 40 African countries, at roughly double the initiative’s starting pace
Indonesia has gone from aid recipient to WFP donor, with free school meals now reaching 62m people
Tobacco use in India has halved this century
For more good news check out Fix The News & Human Progress
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