Contributing Member Charity Update
Thanks to the generous donations of Pittsburgh Cars ‘N’ Coffee contributing members, over the fourth quarter of 2023, we were able to provide funds to GiveWell’s Top Charity Fund which were granted to Malaria Consortium‘s seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) program which distributes antimalarial drugs to children 3 to 59 months old in order to prevent illness and death from malaria. Our donation provided 120 full courses of antimalarial drugs to prevent the disease in young children. GiveWell expects that the work funded by all fourth-quarter Top Charities Fund donations will save over 18,500 lives by distributing life-saving medicine to prevent malaria through Malaria Consortium’s SMC programs in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Togo.
If you wish to get involved, please consider supporting the club and our charities with a membership or supporting GiveWell directly using the links below.
https://pghcnc.com/membership/
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| Impact of the Malaria Consortium Grant This $57.1 million renewal grant[4] will maintain Malaria Consortium’s SMC program in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and Togo, which have some of the highest burdens of malaria mortality in the world.[5] SMC is targeted at young children—a group at high risk of dying from malaria—during the rainy season, when they are most likely to be infected. Because of the low cost (about $8 on average to reach an additional child with SMC for one year) and the high efficacy of the medication, this program is highly cost-effective, saving a life for around $3,200 in the locations supported by this grant. Mass campaigns are the only form of SMC delivery we have heard about, and our understanding is that the World Health Organization recommends that governments prohibit the private sale of SMC drugs in areas implementing the program. Therefore, children are unlikely to access SMC other than through mass campaigns like the ones GiveWell funds. |
 Caregiver and SMC Community Distributor smiling at a child who just received SMC medication. Photo credit: Malaria Consortium/Sophie Grace. |
| About Malaria Consortium Malaria is one of the leading causes of death globally for children under five.[6] Malaria Consortium’s SMC program protects children in this age group against malaria by distributing preventive drugs in areas where transmission is highly seasonal. Malaria Consortium is a leader in the implementation of SMC and has played a major role in its expansion to new locations. It has an especially strong track record delivering SMC programs in Nigeria and Burkina Faso, where it has used GiveWell-directed funding to support SMC campaigns since 2017. It began supporting SMC in Togo in 2021. With GiveWell’s support, the scale of Malaria Consortium’s work has grown rapidly. The number of children receiving SMC from Malaria Consortium because of GiveWell-directed funds increased from around 600,000 in 2017 to around 16 million in 2022[7] (about a third of all children receiving SMC globally).[8] How We Use Donations to the Top Charities Fund Longer term, your gifts are a vital funding stream for our top charities. Our Top Charities Fund is limited to programs that we think have a high likelihood of strong impact, plus an established track record and room to productively use more funding. Gifts directed to the Top Charities Fund are allocated to the most cost-effective, highest-priority gaps among our top charities, based on what we’ve learned through our ongoing research. For each allocation decision, we try to maximize the cost-effectiveness of GiveWell-directed donations over time. We do this by (1) funding opportunities above our cost-effectiveness threshold and (2) not missing out on timely opportunities. Your gifts funded this important malaria prevention work, and your continued support will help us fill the most important funding gaps throughout the years to come. Thank you again for your support! |
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