If you want to help human beings alive right now, there are few better places to give than global health.

Diseases that have been largely eradicated in the US still claim hundreds of thousands of lives abroad. In 2022, the most recent year for which there’s data, ten Americans died of malaria; all acquired it abroad. But the World Health Organization estimates that worldwide, 600,000 people died of it that year, most of them children in Africa.

If you don’t want to think about individual charities at all, the simplest move is to give to GiveWell Top Charities Fund.

You can stop reading here and feel very good about it.

If you want to see how the sausage is made — and what other high-impact options exist — keep going. Check out the following causes:

• Fighting malaria
• Giving kids vitamin A
• Backing vaccinations
• Supporting local NGOs
• Aid to Sudan
• Surveillance to find the next pandemic
• Ending lead poisoning
• Combatting superbugs

For a long time, the world was slowly pushing those numbers down. That progress is now at real risk.

In 2025, the Trump administration effectively dismantled USAID, canceling or gutting thousands of health programs and shifting a skeleton of its staff into the State Department. Other governments around the world have pulled back their funding, too. A conservative real-time tracker attributes roughly 600,000 deaths so far to the collapse of USAID, with modelling suggesting that if cuts on this scale continues, they could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030 from diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and respiratory infections.

The weird, hopeful part is that global health interventions are fairly cheap. that’s how the US and other rich countries succeeded in stamping out these diseases. That is an opportunity for people seeking to give and make others’ lives better: It means that saving a life in a relatively poor country is possible at relatively low cost.

GiveWell, our favorite evaluator of global health charities, estimates that the groups it recommends can save a life for $3,500 to $5,500. Put another way, giving $300 a month for a year could be enough to save someone’s life. There are gym memberships that cost more than that. And there’s never been a better time to make a difference as an individual donor to the health and well-being of people around the world.

So if you want to donate to improve global health, where should you start? There are too many good causes to list here, but hopefully, the ones below give you some ideas.

Fighting malaria

GiveWell, the charity evaluator, currently lists four groups on its “top charities” list. Two of them focus on malaria: Against Malaria Foundation and the Malaria Consortium.

The two groups take two different approaches to preventing malaria transmission, both of which are extremely cost-effective. Against Malaria focuses on funding and distributing insecticide-treated nets, which people in malarial regions (largely sub-Saharan Africa but also parts of South Asia) can sleep under and protect themselves from bites by malaria-carrying mosquitos.

The Vox guide to giving

The holiday season is giving season. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income, to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to explaining what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. You can find all of our giving guide stories here.

The nets themselves are incredibly cheap. GiveWell estimates that Against Malaria can provide a net for 6 each. You may have heard in the news that bednets are sometimes used for other purposes, like fishing. That’s true. GiveWell estimates, based on past studies and their own research, that about 75 percent of nets distributed will be used as intended. And the intervention is still incredibly cost-effective. A meta-analysis looking at five randomized studies of bednets found that mortality from any cause fell by 17 percent among children targeted for bednet distribution (whether they used the nets or not); they were 45 percent less likely to get malaria. The effect on children actually using the nets is, of course, much greater.

The other program GiveWell recommends donating to is the Malaria Consortium’s Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention........

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