Global Health and Wellbeing Grantmaking

Global Health and Wellbeing Grantmaking

Status: ACTIVE
Funder: Coefficient Giving
Last Updated: August 29, 2025

Summary

The Global Health and Wellbeing Grantmaking program by Coefficient Giving focuses on addressing critical health and welfare issues worldwide. With an emphasis on proactive engagement and evidence-based solutions, the initiative supports projects that improve health outcomes and wellbeing. The program prioritizes funding for organizations tackling neglected global health challenges, advocating for effective philanthropy, and enhancing the lives of both humans and animals in vulnerable communities.

Overview

NOTE: We expect to fund very few proposals that come to us via unsolicited contact. As such, we have no formal process for accepting such proposals and may not respond to inquiries. In general, we expect to identify most giving opportunities via proactive searching and networking. If you would like to suggest that we consider a grant — whether for your project or someone else’s — please contact us. Open Philanthropy Project Focus Areas So far, the focus areas we have selected fall into one of two broad categories: Global Health and Wellbeing (GHW) and Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR). We summarize the key differences between these portfolios as follows: While GCR grants tend to be evaluated based on something like “How much this grant reduces the chance of a catastrophic event that endangers billions of people”, GHW grants tend to be evaluated based on something like “How much this grant increases health (denominated in e.g. life-years) and/or wellbeing, worldwide.” The GHW team places greater weight on evidence, precedent, and track record in its giving; the GCR team tends to focus on problems and interventions where evidence and track records are often comparatively thin. (That said, the GHW team does support a significant amount of low-probability but high-upside work like policy advocacy and scientific research.) The GCR team’s work could be hugely important, but it’s very hard to answer questions like “How will we know whether this work is on track to have an impact?” We can track intermediate impacts and learn to some degree, but some key premises likely won’t become very clear for decades or more. (Our primary goal is for catastrophic events not to happen, and to the extent we succeed, it can be hard to learn from the absence of events.) By contrast, we generally expect the work of the GHW team to be more likely to result in recognizable impact on a given ~10-year time frame, and to be more amenable to learning and changing course as we go. Global Health and Wellbeing focus areas Effective Altruism (Global Health and Wellbeing) - Many people want to help others, and seek out ways to do so effectively. We empower people to use their careers and donations to help others as much as possible. We believe that individuals can have a huge positive impact on the world by being thoughtful about how they can best use their resources to help others. We support organizations and projects that enable people to use their careers and donations to improve the lives of humans and animals around the world. Our work is guided primarily by two observations: First, there is large variation in the impact that different charitable organizations can achieve. By focusing on important, neglected problems and relying on evidence-based solutions, top charities, such as those recommended by GiveWell, can achieve much more than others with the same donation. GiveWell estimates that the funding it has directed since inception will save at least 200,000 lives.Second, the career a person chooses is one of the most important decisions they can make — and a career focused on important and neglected problems is likely to achieve much more impact. Today, however, there is a lack of quality resources and guidance that can help people find and pursue these kinds of careers. Farm Animal Welfare - Tens of billions of animals are kept in factory farms globally, usually in harsh and inhumane conditions. We support efforts to improve the lives of animals confined on factory farms, and to end factory farming. We support reforms to phase out the worst factory farm practices on land and sea. Through our cage-free work, we seek to end the use of cruel battery cages, used to confine about seven billion hens globally. Our broiler welfare initiative supports better welfare for the roughly 15 billion broiler chickens alive globally. And our fish welfare work supports the establishment of minimum standards for the world’s over 70 billion farmed fish. We also fund scientific research to find new ways to help farm animals. This includes the development of innovative technologies (like in ovo sexing to end the killing of male chicks in the egg industry) and research into chronic welfare problems (like keel bone fractures in layer hens) in the hope of finding ways to reduce pain and suffering. We want to expand the global farm animal welfare movement, especially in emerging economies where the majority of the world’s farmed animals live. We’re especially focused on expanding advocacy in East and Southeast Asia. Global Aid Policy - International aid improves millions of people’s health and wellbeing. We think it can do even more. We’re working to create a future where wealthy countries give more aid to other countries in ways that help more people survive and thrive. International aid has helped save millions of lives, reduce poverty, and increase prosperity for millions of people throughout the past century. But there is still more to do. At the end of 2022, more than 8% of the world’s population — as many as 670 million people — were thought to be living on less than $2.15 per person per day. If trends continue, we will not achieve the global goals of ending global poverty and significantly improving health and well-being by 2030. We launched our Global Aid Policy program in early 2022 to support efforts to increase government aid and guide it toward more cost-effective approaches that can improve people’s health and well-being. We focus our new, relatively small resources in ways we believe complement other donors and can go especially far: Increasing aid budgets, especially for multilateral health organizations operating in low-income countries.Improving existing aid programs by helping leaders draw on evaluations and technical analysis.Using our flexible resources creatively to accelerate progress. Global Health & Development - We believe that every life has value — and that philanthropic dollars can go particularly far by helping those who are living in poverty by global standards. We support work to save and improve lives in low- and middle-income countries. Most of our giving in this category is to organizations recommended by GiveWell, with whom we have a close relationship. We are excited to support cost-effective interventions to save and improve lives in low- and middle-income countries. An additional subset of our giving supports scientific research we believe can help address diseases that disproportionately afflict the global poor. Global Health R&D - Improving diagnosis, prevention and treatment of the most neglected diseases could save and improve the lives of millions of people.. We seek to support the development of new vaccines, drugs, and other tools to improve global health. Historically, health technologies like vaccines and drugs have saved millions of lives around the world. However, diseases primarily affecting the world’s poorest people, such as tuberculosis, malaria, diarrheal diseases, rheumatic heart disease, and sickle cell disease receive much less research and development spending relative to their health burdens than diseases affecting the wealthy. Further investments could prevent millions of deaths and illnesses caused by neglected diseases. Open Philanthropy has supported scientific research for human health since 2016. Over time we have learned that there are many excellent opportunities in global health R&D that we could support with increased resources and specialized staff. As a result, we launched this new program in 2023, substantially increasing our total funding in the area. The Global Health R&D team works in parallel and in collaboration with our Scientific Research team, but with a greater focus on supporting tools and treatments through the development life cycle, including those requiring early proof of concept studies, human efficacy trials or implementation research. We are interested in funding research and development for new vaccines, diagnostics, drugs, monoclonal antibodies, and vector control tools for diseases with a large global health burden, as well as efforts to make these products more affordable and accessible. Global Public Health Policy - Some of the world’s worst health issues can be addressed through public policy. We support work on policies that cost-effectively address major public health issues. Policies like air quality regulations, tobacco and alcohol taxes, and the elimination of leaded gasoline have saved and improved millions of lives. These policies typically improve public health by addressing risk factors to alleviate the burden of non-communicable disease, which comprises a growing share of the health burden but receives relatively few resources. Policy interventions affect entire populations and are often cost-effective for governments to implement. We think philanthropy can have an outsized impact by helping governments design, implement, and enforce more effective public health policies. Because the benefits are diffuse, and responsibility for addressing them can cut across government departments and disease categories, many problems that are addressable through public health policy are currently neglected. Innovation Policy - Scientific discovery and technological innovation are key contributors to economic growth and material progress. We hope to safely accelerate scientific and technological progress to make life better for billions of people. Historically, economic growth and scientific innovation have created enormous social benefits, lifting billions of people out of poverty and improving health outcomes around the world. At the same time, innovation carries risk; some technologies have the potential to do far more harm than good. Our goal is to accelerate growth and innovation, without unduly increasing risks from emerging technology. Even small changes to the annual growth rate can compound to great effect over time, which gives us the opportunity to make high-leverage grants. We’re interested in pursuing a wide range of strategies. Our current interests include: Helping build a scientific ecosystem that experiments with new ways of doing things, learns from those experiments, and adopts evidence-based practices. Supporting early-stage development of general technologies with the potential to accelerate scientific progress across many disciplines. Investigating programs and policy reform to help more migrants, especially highly-skilled migrants, move to countries operating on the scientific and technological frontier. Providing financial support for individuals to write “living literature reviews” that rigorously synthesize research and communicate it to a non-specialist audience. (See our call for pre-proposals at right!) Funding programs and research to help identify and minimize potential catastrophic risks from new scientific and technological capabilities. Land Use Reform - Excessively restrictive local land use regulations push people away from centers of economic activity, inhibit innovation, and raise costs for renters. We seek to reduce the harms caused by excessively restrictive local land use regulations. These price increases ( see diagram)  are pronounced in large, high-wage metro areas (e.g., New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington D.C.). More permissive policy which enabled a greater supply of housing in those areas could unlock value by: Encouraging economic growth through greater innovation and agglomeration.Increasing the earnings of individuals moving to high-wage jobs in those areas. Enabling more people to live in denser areas, which have lower carbon emissions. Redistributing wealth and income to lower-income households and supporting access to housing for lower earners. Scientific Research - We believe scientific progress has been, and will continue to be, one of the biggest contributors to improvements in human wellbeing, and we hope to play a part in this We aim to support research that could affect a large number of people. We primarily support biomedical research but our interests are not limited to any particular field, disease, condition, or population. Instead, we seek to identify scientific research that has the potential for high impact and is under-supported by other funders. We are excited to support high-risk and unconventional science when the potential impact is sufficiently large. We are broadly interested in research that may lead to improved understanding of topics related to human health. We are most interested in research that could affect a large number of people. We typically start by looking for metrics related to the number of lives affected (often starting with the World Health Organization’s Global Health Estimates and IHME’s Global Burden of Disease Study). We begin with landscaping exercises to identify important research topics that could have the greatest impact in a given area. Once we understand the research gaps in these fields, we assess which gaps are underfunded and seem most amenable to progress if funded. Often as part of this process, we will attend scientific conferences and interview scientists as advisors, peer reviewers, or potential grantees. Some aspects of the following topics are currently of particular interest: broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, vaccine development, basic immunology, some aspects of cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, predicting mouse-to-human translation, control of inflammation, epigenetics, novel scientific tools and methods, malaria, and research on how biomedical research may be improved.

Eligibility

You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website. While we almost never fund unsolicited proposals, we do run programs that solicit funding requests from individuals, groups, and organizations.