January 2026

Hits-based giving, Coefficient Giving and USA giving

Jan 02, 2026

I’ve compiled a list of hits-based giving opportunities for donors open to higher-risk global development bets.

There’s extensive research for GiveWell-style cost-effective interventions but far less for those wanting to take bigger swings. The post covers economic growth, health, meta and a few other topics. Although it is an unvetted initial list, you’ll have to do your own investigations to see if any options fit into your giving plans.

Jobs

In Development - Seeking 2-4k word narrative essays ($2k payment) on how progress happens in LMICs
GiveWell
Prevail Fund - Researcher, New Initiatives
XTX Markets - Philanthropy Manager
Coefficient Giving - Senior Editor
Taimaka - Executive Director
LEEP
- Head of People
- Chief of Staff
- Senior Campaigns Consultant
Giving What We Can - Research Director
CHAI
- Program Manager, Internal AI
- Manager, Maximum Impact Incubator
Renaissance Philanthropy
- Director, Cardiovascular Nutrition Fund
- Full Stack Software Engineer, Engineering Hub
- Machine Learning Engineer, Engineering Hub
CGD - Assistant Director for Institutional Advancement
Evidence Action - AI for Good, Program Lead
Probably Good Job Board

Aid

Sweden and Germany slash aid budgets to focus on Ukraine and defence spending
- £800m from Sweden and £920m from Germany
Norway to increase support for African Development Fund
Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur - Update on lives lost from USAID cuts
- Cuts may cause 500k-1.6m additional deaths annually, with limited compensating response from other donors
United Nations cuts its 2026 emergency aid budget in half
America first global health strategy
- Expanding faith-based healthcare in Nigeria
  - The US has signed a five-year, $2.1b health partnership with Nigeria that conditions aid on $3b domestic co-investment and prioritises funding for Christian faith-based clinics
- Strengthening health ties with Uganda and Lesotho
- USs and Kenya sign five-year, $2.5b health cooperation framework
LessWrong - I tried reproducing that Lancet study about USAID cuts so you don’t have to
Most Irish foreign aid never leaves the country
DevEx - Rethinking development funding means making it matter to the median voter
Launch of the UK government’s new approach to Africa
- Shifting from a ‘donor-recipient’ model to an ‘investor-partner’ strategy

Growth

Nature - Economic inequality does not equate to poor well-being or mental health
- A meta-analysis of 168 studies covering ~11 million people
Latin America reached its lowest ever poverty rate in 2024
Oliver Kim - According to satellite data, North Korean GDP per capita grew at around 3% per year from 1999 to 2013, contradicting the Bank of Korea’s estimates of decline
Brian Albrecht - GDP still wins - The only number that really matters
Brazil: The heart of the ‘zombie’ economy in emerging markets
- Brazil has roughly 2.3x the emerging market average of zombie companies (firms whose debt interest exceeds profits), at ~17% vs ~8%
How Kerala eliminated extreme poverty
Noah Smith - I think India can do it
- India is poised to become a developed nation within decades as sustained ~8% growth, driven by a booming manufacturing sector and financial reforms
Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur & Arvind Subramanian - We were wrong about convergence
- Several years ago, we celebrated a new era of unconditional convergence of global incomes. Since then, the trend has reversed

Health

IHME - Nearly one in five child deaths linked to child growth failure
Saloni Dattani - Medical breakthroughs in 2025
WHO World Malaria Report estimates 610k deaths in 2024, up slightly from 597k in 2023
Gates Foundation - 2025 Goalkeepers report
Nigeria closes factories linked to US auto industry amid lead poisoning inquiry
Kenya pushes back as US eyes more African health deals
Headache disorders affect 3 billion people worldwide - nearly one in every three people, ranking sixth for health loss
Global Health Insights - Universal Health Coverage: The Emperor has no clothes
- UHC coverage has been essentially flat since 2015, yet successive UN reports frame this stagnation positively
Measles deaths down 88% since 2000
2024 was among the worst years for measles outbreaks since the early 2000s

Governance & Policy

Isha Malhotra - India’s labor law overhaul: snapshot of key changes
Dan Lewis - The worst policies in the developed world
Bhutan pledges up to 10,000 Bitcoin (~$1b) to build new ‘mindfulness’ city
Cryptocurrency trading now legal in Ghana
World Bank
- Tracking welfare in real time: How can data keep policy one step ahead?
- Innovation in development: Lessons from World Bank experience
  - An analysis of 7,576 Independent Evaluation Group project evaluations from 1998 to 2025 reveals that innovative development projects consistently outperform standard interventions, prompting the World Bank to institutionalise experimentation through a dedicated Department for Innovation launched in 2024

Trade

DevEx - Can the US-Africa trade program AGOA be resurrected?
Africa in Brief - According to signals from major carriers, a partial reopening of the Red Sea route as early as 2026 could drive shipping costs sharply lower, easing global supply chains
China’s critical minerals strategy in Africa
- China has gained a dominant position in Africa’s critical minerals sector through long-term investments in mining and refining capacity, making it challenging for African countries to advance up the value chain

Development Finance

African Development Fund secured record $11b for 2025-28, 23% above previous replenishment
Kenya & US DFC to proceed with $1b debt-for-food swap
DevEx
- US DFC reauthorisation bill would expand spending cap from $60b to $205b, extend authority to 2031, allow high-income country investments
- As the World Bank’s outcome-oriented approach takes hold, aligning incentives will ensure this shift is a durable one
- World Bank backs nuclear revival while gas stays a political fault line
OPEC Fund approved $600m across 15 projects in LMICs
IMF - Ghana’s fifth ECF review
- Inflation down to single digits for first time since 2021
- Public debt trajectory improved from 79% to projected 57% of GDP
- Primary surplus of 1.5% on track
CGD - DFC, critical minerals and peace in DRC?
- The US is pivoting from aid to trade by using the DFC to challenge Chinese mining dominance in the DRC

Emerging Tech & Development

Equiano - Frontier 2025 - a curated review of breakthroughs and deployments across Africa’s AI landscape
GoogleDeepMind - 1,001 real-world AI use cases
James Ransom - Will AI eat India?
- The characteristics that made India attractive for human-performed cognitive tasks (routine, rules-based, digitally mediated work) also define the task categories most amenable to AI substitution
Windfall Trust
- AI’s 2025 labour market impacts
  - AI slowing white-collar job growth and reducing entry-level hiring in exposed roles, but no clear aggregate employment or wage effects yet, with adoption still under 10% of US firms
- If AI stays “jagged”, it could be good news for workers
How AI can detect faults in broken WASH infrastructure
GoogleDeepMind
- Engineering more resilient crops for a warming climate
- AlphaFold: Five years of impact
What does AI mean for data analysts in government (and beyond)?
AI agents could transform Indian manufacturing
Semafor - UAE blockchain project eyes Africa growth through M-Pesa deal
Agricultural drones are taking off globally, saving farmers time and money
As India pushes drone deliveries, gig workers fear added insecurity
WeRide and Uber launch Middle East’s first fully driverless robotaxi commercial operations in Abu Dhabi
Chris Paxton - Where the Horses Went - An optimistic case for robotics and what that means for the rest of us
Rose Mutiso - Why one of the year’s biggest AI-for-development stories isn’t actually about AI
- India’s AI monsoon forecasting success (quarter of 38m farmers changed planting decisions based on accurate 4-week predictions) worked because AI amplified decades of existing infrastructure, institutional relationships and delivery systems rather than creating impact from scratch
Nature - A database of 2.75 billion buildings could help scientists to monitor urban planning, climate change, disaster risks and corruption.
Credit: Zhu et al./ESSD

Evidence & Data

CGD - What’s the latest research on human development in economics? A roundup from NEUDC 2025
Saloni’s guide to data visualisation
When (not) to target social programs: the simple arithmetic of the effectiveness of scale-up
- Applying the framework to Mozambique’s national social pension program, they find that zero targeting effort may be optimal in over 60% of administrative areas, and reallocating existing resources could raise welfare by 13%
Contra Yascha Mounk on ‘The World Happiness Report is a Sham’
Oliver Hanney - Ten key insights from development economics in 2025
John H. Cochrane - Causation does not imply variation
Justin Sandefur on issues with surveys
Justin Sandefur@JustinSandefur
TOP: Household surveys ask women age 15-49 a lot more questions. BOTTOM: So enumerators appear to drop them, non-randomly. Adjusting for this "[calls] into question whether Africa’s fertility transition is as uniquely slow as previously thought." economics.yale.edu/sites/default/…
1:52 PM · Dec 9, 2025 · 16.1K Views
4 Replies · 20 Reposts · 65 Likes

Startups & Business

$1.57b share sale hands Vodafone majority control of Safaricom
How Jumia lost its way
Building trust and transparency via text message: how digital receipts change smallholder markets
PayPal plans Africa global digital wallet launch in 2026
Realistic Optimist
- The Filipino ecosystem, explained by a Filipino VC
- Temtem: digitising Algeria’s retail sector

Infrastructure

The state of inclusive instant payment systems in Africa - 2025 report
$500m Africa-focused infrastructure fund launched
Is competition the missing piece in South Africa’s port reform puzzle?
Microsoft invests $17.5b in India to drive AI diffusion at population scale
DFC and a consortium sign $553m loan for Angola railway revamp

Agriculture & Food

World Bank - How digital monitoring expands access to mechanisation in agriculture
Tanzania has confirmed an agricultural investment valued at $640m for large-scale cassava production
Stella Katelyne - The rise of the data-driven fisherfolk in Kenya
Inside the mushroom economy in Nigeria
Nigeria loses ~$9.5b each year to post-harvest losses
African agtechs raised $170m in 2025
For more African agriculture news check out Ag Safari by Hannatu Asheolge

Energy & Climate

Africa’s industrial growth needs abundant power
India to open nuclear power industry to private sector
Ken Opalo - Firms or Families? Another instalment in the Mission 300 electrification debate
Semafor - Nuclear energy poised to rise sharply in Africa’s power mix
Hannah Ritchie - What happened on energy and climate in China this year?

Education

VoxDev with a literature review of education technology
Oliver Kim - In an experiment with 684 developing-country education policymakers, “dutiful citizens are worth nearly 50 percent more to officials than children learning how to read.”
World Bank - Is the learning crisis partly a motivation crisis?
Aliko Dangote’s foundation pledged ~$688m to fund STEM education, girls’ schooling and teacher training

Migration

BCG - Global talent mobility is slowing and shifting
~28% of intra-African travel is now visa-free, up from 20% in 2016
Lauren Gilbert - Immigration and Innovation
Laurenz Guenther - Why immigration research is probably biased
Alexander Kustov- Do people like refugees more than economic immigrants?

Conflict, Corruption & Crime

Dan Lewis - Nine major conflicts we have ignored for Ukraine and Gaza
Syria after Assad: A year in numbers
- 1m+ refugees returned since regime fell
- World Bank forecasts 1% GDP growth in 2025
ACLED - What’s driving conflict today? A review of global trends
Semafor - Timing of Guinea-Bissau coup raises key questions
Peter Evans - The scale of aid resources put into ‘Democracy and Governance’, and the effect of the abrupt end of such aid
Landmine casualties hit four-year high as treaty setbacks deepen
A critical assessment of ECOWAS’ role in safeguarding democracy in West Africa
Uganda stops granting refugee status for Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians
Ten African security trends from 2025

Innovation & Metascience

Karthik Tadepalli- Ideas aren’t getting harder to find
- Allocative efficiency has declined. More productive firms aren’t gaining market share over less productive ones
PaperTrails - A GoodReads for papers, posts and research
Frontier of the Year 2025 - A list of 200+ events and scientific results
- How did the world change this year? Which results are speculative? Which are biggest, if true?
Andrew Gerard - Relaunching Macroscience
The Good Science Project
- Why metascience needs micro and macro
- A good science manifesto
- Innovations in scientific institutions
Alex Tabarrok - Innovations in health care
Noah Smith - China has invented a whole new way to do innovation
- Extreme vertical integration

Charities & Foundations

Kevin Starr - There is no such thing as impact investing
Seema Jayachandran - Offering higher salaries than social-sector peers
Joey - Getting feedback as a foundation
- How to get honest feedback when no one is incentivised to give it
The EA Forum has a series of posts from people on why they donate
Revisiting Well, Well, Well…do wells clear the bar?
- An updated evaluation of Wells4Wellness, an organisation that drills and maintains wells in Niger
Templeton World Charity Foundation is soliciting short-pitch research ideas covering fundamental science and human flourishing
- Explicitly seeking high-risk contrarian ideas early-career researchers might struggle to find funding for elsewhere
Yulia Chekhovska - How I attempted to measure the impact of my Japan non-profit’s youth suicide prevention program
Alexander Berger on seeing CG as the 12th biggest funder for global health R&D (and 3rd biggest foundation?)
Alexander Berger@albrgr
New G-FINDER data on global health R&D funding is out
10:50 PM · Dec 11, 2025 · 7.18K Views
3 Replies · 6 Reposts · 107 Likes

Good News

Taiwan has achieved its hepatitis C elimination targets ahead of schedule
Prasanna Viswanathan - India’s poorest households just lived through a decade of historic upgrade
- Rural vehicle ownership jumped 6%→47%
- Urban poorest owning bikes/cars grew 20%→60%
- Fridges, not long ago considered a luxury, now reach 46% rural and 58% urban among the poorest
- Mobile phones are now universal with 94%+ even among the bottom 40%.
Brazil eliminates mother-to-child transmission of HIV
Human Progress - 1,084 reasons the world isn’t falling apart
Fix The News - All the news the headlines missed in 2025
For more good news check out Fix The News & Human Progress

Global Development & Economic Advancement

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