2025 Giving Season Charities Update: ‘Tis the season to be giving
0. Intro: Our Top Charities are still on top – and even better than we thought
Over the past year, we have conducted research across multiple areas, including digital mental health, palliative care, musculoskeletal charities, and psychedelics for cluster headaches. After all this work, we did not add any new Top or Promising charities. This was simply because we didn’t find anything we were confident would be similar or higher impact than our existing recommendations. We think this should be reassuring to our donors as it indicates our current recommendations truly are hard to beat.
We did, however, discover something important: the best charities are even better than anyone expected, including us. This year, we published a chapter in the World Happiness Report, which is better-known for producing the country rankings (the ones the Nordics always win) but also produces leading research. Our chapter was, as far as we know, the first truly global comparison of charities and their cost-effectiveness.
The results were staggering. The data shows the best charities have about 1,000 times more impact than ‘standard’ charities; we compared between charities using WELLBYs per dollar. In other words, you’d only need to give $100 to one of our top charities to do as much good as giving $100,000 to a standard charity.
While you might have heard the claim “the best charities are 100x average ones”, our research is the strongest evidence into how much charities differ – and find bigger differences than charities experts previously supposed. All this in stark contrast with the expectations of the public: we ran a survey and found people expect the best charities are only 3x more impactful than average ones.
So what are these amazing charities which topped our list at the end of this year? Read on to find out about:
- Our recommended charities for 2025
- The work we did looking into other charities,
- Our broader research, including the World Happiness report chapter and the 1000x claim,
- Our plans for the next year, and finally,
- How you can help us with our mission!
1. Our recommendations
Overview
Our current recommendations are summarised in the figure below, where we show the cost-effectiveness of charities in terms of WELLBYs created per $1,000 donated. This brings together the best evidence we have about how different programmes improve people’s lives, from treating depression to reducing lead exposure and tackling child malnutrition.
We use three different categories for our charities. The:
- Top Charities are your best option if you want to be confident your donation will have a highly cost-effective impact.
- Promising Charities are for donors who want potentially higher impact but are comfortable with more uncertainty in the evidence. These are ‘higher-risk, potentially higher reward’
- Honourable Mentions are for donors interested in backing early-stage, innovative, and even higher-risk opportunities.
We explain more about them below and provide a link to donate to each.
But what if you don’t want to pick? Let us do it for you. This year, we’ve introduced a new, simpler way to give: the Happier Lives Fund. We allocate 90% of your donation to whichever mix of our Top and Promising Charities we believe will do the most good, and use the remaining 10% to support HLI’s research and outreach. This is maximum impact, made easy.
The recommended charities
StrongMinds (Top Charity)
What do they do and why do we recommend them?
- StrongMinds provides lay-delivered group psychotherapy to people with depression in Uganda, Zambia, and more and more places.
- Our analysis finds it costs $45 per person treated, which has an overall impact of 1.80 WELLBYs, resulting in a cost-effectiveness of 40 WELLBYs created per $1,000 donated (or, a cost of $25 to produce a WELLBY).
- To assess StrongMinds we used our systematic review and meta-analysis of the academic literature of psychotherapy in low- and middle-income countries, and then combined this with the evidence from StrongMinds’ own programmes.
- We rate it as a Top Charity because it is highly cost-effective at improving global wellbeing and we are confident about our analysis.
- You can find the full (~200 page) report here.
Funding gap: Their goals are $12 million for 2026. As of now, they have raised approximately $6.5 million, leaving a remaining gap of $5.5 million.
They have treated their 1 millionth person (1,114,378 as of Q2 2025 to be exact)! Roughly, this could represent 1.8 million WELLBYs produced over the course of their operations.
An important change for StrongMinds is that they will no longer have StrongMinds staff directly delivering psychotherapy (this represented 5% of treated clients in 2023). They have transitioned towards fully treating people through partners: peer facilitators (individuals who have received the StrongMinds programme before), government-affiliated community health workers and teachers, and 15 NGO partners who work in other countries (e.g., Kenya).
StrongMinds now see themselves increasingly as a general technical adviser and facilitator to African governments and other NGOs. They mentioned having implemented processes to ensure high quality of training and delivery across all types of delivery. They are also rolling out district-level implementation strategies with the government in Uganda (which has led to a cost per person reduction). They have secured partnerships with county governments in Kenya, and the Ministry of Health in Malawi to support implementing their model.
StrongMinds have also facilitated advocacy work, for which they have hired a Head of Advocacy. For example, they successfully partnered with teenagers to lobby the Ministry of Health in Uganda to change policy such that schools must dedicate one hour per week to mental health (this is from the Ministry of Education and Sports’ Circular 20, which you can read more about here). StrongMinds is going to help support the schools in delivering this. The effect of this change is yet to be evaluated.
We are excited to see how successful this scale-up through the government will be.
One important change is that StrongMinds’ cost to treat depression has been declining. In 2023, it cost $41 per person (which is the figure we used in our report). In 2024, StrongMinds treated 426,642 persons for expenses of $9,818,833, resulting in a cost per person of $23. They estimate that they will reach a cost of $20 per person in 2025 (which is still at $23 as of Q2 2025), which would increase StrongMinds’s cost-effectiveness to 90 WELLBY created per $1,000 donated (or $11 to create a WELLBY).
StrongMinds’ study showing that reducing the number of sessions could be cost-effective because it didn’t significantly reduce impact has now been published (Kasujja et al., 2025). They have also recently started investigating the effectiveness of single-session psychotherapy within their model (with Dr Schleider). Moreover, they are now actively fundraising for an RCT of their programme conducted in partnership with ID Insight and Dr Baranov. We are very excited about this news, as the lack of a relevant RCT is a core uncertainty we mentioned in our report and explained pithily here. We played a role in directing some funding towards it by informing funders about the value of information that the RCT could provide. Finally, StrongMinds has been running a pilot RCT in preparation for the rollout of the actual RCT.
Friendship Bench (Top Charity)
What do they do and why do we recommend them?
- Friendship Bench provides one-to-one lay-delivered psychotherapy to people in need, in Zimbabwe.
- Our analysis finds it costs $16.50 per person treated, having an overall impact of 0.80 WELLBYs, resulting in a cost-effectiveness of 49 WELLBYs created per $1,000 donated (or, a cost of $21 to produce a WELLBY).
- To assess Friendship Bench we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the academic literature of psychotherapy in low- and middle-income countries, and then combined this with the evidence from Friendship Bench’s own programmes.
- We recommend Friendship Bench because it is among the most cost-effective charities we’ve found, where we’ve also assessed in it great detail
- You can find the full (~200 page) report here.
Funding gap: Their goals are to raise $4.1 million for 2026, $4.1 million for 2027, and $200,000 for innovation. As of now, they have raised approximately $5.4 million, leaving a remaining gap of $2.9 million.
Friendship Bench is aiming for its 1 millionth client by the end of this year. Roughly, this could represent 800,000 WELLBYs produced over the course of their operations.
Friendship Bench is working on scaling collaboration with Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Health and Child Care (MoHCC). They have obtained a commitment from the government to work with them over the next five years to integrate the Friendship Bench model to all levels of psychosocial care in Zimbabwe’s 10 provinces. The aim is for the government to provide the Friendship Bench model via community health workers working under the MoHCC. Friendship Bench have obtained that mental health indicators are now part of the MoHCC’s data system, and have started training agents. There is still much more to do, including training more people, collecting data about the impact of the programme as delivered by the government, and piloting the collaboration in three provinces (Masvingo, Harare, and Mashonaland Central).
We are excited to see how successful this scale-up through the government will be, and whether this will change our evaluation of Friendship Bench.
Friendship Bench are also making improvements to their work and monitoring and evaluation data. For example they are:
- Transitioning from virtual follow-ups to face-to-face follow-ups to improve response rates,
- Enhancing training and supervision, as well as conducting more rapid data quality assessments of certain areas of operation, and are
- Conducting a study of single-session therapy, which would help us understand how effective their model can be with just one session. This is potentially different from someone attending only one out of 6 possible sessions.
Part of the Friendship Bench funding gap is $200,000 for their ‘Innovation budget’, which is yet to be filled. This would permit for an independent evaluation of Friendship Bench’s impact and data, evaluate the Friendship Bench programme as delivered by government, and track more indicators.
Friendship Bench’s costs have not changed much from a cost to treat of $16.50 in 2023 (which we used in our analysis) to $16.21 in 2024.
Pure Earth (Promising Charity)
What do they do and why do we recommend them?
- Pure Earth works with governments and businesses to reduce exposure to toxic lead in products. Note that Pure Earth runs several programmes; however, we just focused on their cosmetics programme in Ghana, as they said it was their most cost-effective unfunded programme.
- We estimated that Pure Earth’s project will have a relatively small effect per person, but it could affect a huge number (over 9.1 million children), creating an astonishing 226,702 WELLBYs for a small cost of around $2 million. This implies a cost-effectiveness of just over 105 WELLBYs created per $1000 donated or around $9 per WELLBY.
- We rate them as a Promising Charity because we think they are highly cost-effective – possibly even more so than our Top Charities – at improving global wellbeing, however there is more uncertainty in our analysis making them a higher-risk, higher-reward investment.
- You can read our blog for more information or find the full report here.
Funding gap: The funding gap for their cosmetics project in Ghana is now ~$1,545,000,
Pure Earth’s cosmetics project in Ghana is underway. They have made strides in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency and the government in Ghana. They have signed an MOU with the Ghana Standards Authority to begin the process of adopting standards for eyeliner cosmetics in the country. A consultant has been hired to conduct a regulatory analysis of cosmetics in Ghana. Pure Earth has started in-depth research to identify the key stakeholders within the eyeliner sector (suppliers, distributors, regulators, consumers, etc.). All of that has been accomplished despite some delays caused by the recent change in government in Ghana.
This year, Pure Earth has been pushing forward the state of research about lead exposure in the world, including: their cumulative blood lead levels metric (which involves multiplying the blood lead level by the population size) and a study of the role of the actions of the Georgian government, with the help of Pure Earth. In 2023, in Poti, Georgia, measures of blood lead levels (BLLs) were taken for 2-7-year-olds (n = 63), and lead content was analysed in spices and other products. Results were compared to a previous study in 2018. There was a decline in BLLs from 7.5 to 2.05, and a decline in lead concentrations in spices from 4.2 mg/kg to 0.25 mg/kg. This adds to our belief that Pure Earth’s actions can lead to important change.
Taimaka (Promising Charity)
What do they do and why do we recommend them?
- Taimaka treats children with acute malnutrition in Gombe State, Nigeria, working through local health facilities so that children get life-saving therapeutic food and medical care when they most need it.
- Our central estimate is that Taimaka has a cost to treat a child of $87, which produces an overall benefit of 5.43 WELLBYs. This results in a cost-effectiveness of 68 WELLBYs per $1,000 donated (or a cost of $15 to produce a WELLBY).
- We rate Taimaka as a Promising Charity because their Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) model appears substantially life-improving and cost-effective, even under conservative assumptions. The level of uncertainty in our estimate is higher than our Top Charities though, so we consider them a higher-risk, higher-reward investment.
- You can find the full (~45 page) report here. Although this was a shallow review, it is currently the deepest wellbeing-focused assessment of malnutrition treatments we are aware of.
Funding gap: Taimaka’s funding gap is $300,000 for 2026 and $450,000 for 2027.
Taimaka is scaling up. They aim to treat 75,000 children over the next 2 years, and have therefore opened five new outpatient therapeutic programmes, doubling their caseload in Gombe. Costs are likely to go down with economies of scale.
Their model remains the same, but they are piloting a conditional cash transfer for under-6-month-old care. Taimaka is also conducting an RCT of caregiver mental health (n=2,630) where caregivers with symptoms of depression are enrolled into PM+ (a form of psychotherapy recommended by the WHO). They are also doing a relapse study (n=1,820), tracking post-discharge nutritional outcomes. Results for all these studies are yet to come.
2. Why haven’t we added anything new? Here are the other charities & causes we looked at in 2025
None of the charities we reviewed this year met our threshold for the Top or Promising categories. That’s not for lack of searching – our team has worked on a wide range of projects – but simply because our existing recommendations set a very high bar.
As part of our more standard charity evaluation work we have spent quite a bit of time this year looking into pain. We assessed three areas we thought were promising: palliative care, headaches and musculoskeletal pain. Our key results were as follows:
- Palliative care appears to be the most promising area in the field of pain to improve global wellbeing. We estimated the cost-effectiveness of Pallium, a charity working on improving palliative care coverage in India, could be between 26-163 WBp1k. Our analysis is currently in progress, so we haven’t (yet) included them as an ‘honourable mention’. We aim to publish this early next year.
- World Spine Care which works to relieve musculoskeletal pain (like low back pain) in developing countries creates between 15-21 WBp1k, which was not enough for them to be considered for our next round of research.
- We found no appropriate charities working on alleviating migraine pain, and are unconvinced it would be an effective area to set up a charity in.
- Cluster Free is a new organisation working on alleviating the excruciating pain of cluster headaches. We found the evidence in this field was too weak and the organisation too new to be able to estimate impact in any meaningful way. However, we think it is an interesting area that has a very limited resources (i.e., it is neglected), and represents some of the worst individual suffering imaginable (i.e., it is important). The crux of the issue will be in the tractability of their work, but we think providing early-stage foundational funding could be an interesting option for donors who place a high priority on high levels of individual suffering and have a high risk tolerance.
We’ve done very detailed analyses of a few mental health charities. This year, we were commissioned by Bloom to write a broader cause area report and look beyond mood disorders. The key takeaways from the report were:
- Mental health problems are exceptionally painful: Mental health problems (such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia) can cause intense suffering and interfere with daily functioning. They are among the most misery-inducing of life’s common misfortunes. Depression and anxiety reduce life satisfaction by around 1 point on a 0–10 scale – that’s roughly twice the impact of unemployment, divorce, or chronic physical conditions like arthritis.
- Mental health problems are very common: These conditions are not rare. The most recent and reliable data indicate that 18% of the global population currently lives with a mental health condition – up from 16% in 2019. The number is much higher if we’re talking about lifetime prevalence. For example, the number of people currently experiencing depression globally is around 5%, but the number who will ever experience it is ~5 times larger at around 25%. So what do you get when you combine a problem that is painful and prevalent? You get a problem that represents 7.67% of the health burden worldwide (measured in disability adjusted life years, DALYs). This might not sound like much, but it puts it as a problem on par with malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/ AIDS combined.
- Mental health problems are very neglected: Despite having a comparable burden on health to HIV/AIDs, Malaria, and tuberculosis combined, it receives 0.22% of the health-directed aid (compared to 35.87% for the other three diseases combined). Yet this low level of funding isn’t because there are no solutions. In fact, most common mental health disorders like depression and anxiety have been proven to be effectively treatable for less than $50 a person, and these treatments are cost-effective (we’re talking about our top charities here).
Acción Transformadora (ACTRA) provides group therapy to young men with violent or criminal backgrounds in order to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour in Latin America. They are currently piloting their programme to find the most impactful way to implement it.
We use a predictive model to estimate their future cost-effectiveness to be around 37 WELLBYs per $1k. We are excited to see this project move forward. If you want to know more ,you can read our full report (~8 pages).
Their current funding gap is $121,000. In light of their size and newness, we don’t think it would be a good use of our resources to do a (much) deeper investigation at this stage.
We are currently evaluating the Shamiri Institute, an NGO working in Kenya. They deliver task-shifted, in-person, positive-psychology-flavoured short courses of psychotherapy to adolescents in high school. We expect this to be available and published early in 2026.
Some charities have fallen down the rankings.
Read below to find out why parenting has been downgraded for now, and why NEPI has been removed entirely from our recommendations.
Although our 2024 work highlighted the promise of Reach Up’s icddr,b parenting programme, there is currently no direct way for donors to fund that specific programme, so we could not continue to recommend the charity. However, we continue to think that well-designed parenting interventions are a highly promising area. For that reason, we now list “parenting charities” in general as an Honourable Mention as a placeholder while we look for a high-impact charity in this category.
We are no longer recommending NEPI (since September 11th, 2025), following the discovery of financial irregularities and the organisation’s decision to discontinue operations. Our assessment of ACTRA, which is based on separate evidence and modelling, is unchanged.
3. Beyond Recommendations: How We’re Advancing Wellbeing Science
HLI has a dual mandate: we assess how much wellbeing charities create per dollar, but we also do theoretical and applied work to advance wellbeing science. Given how new wellbeing priorities work, this is both necessary and important (it’s like we’re building planes, but it’s 1905, not 2025).
A big part of our 2025 was our chapter published in the 2025 World Happiness Report, which was accompanied by a series of blogs and a media campaign. This was the first global review of charity cost-effectiveness evaluations in terms of WELLBYs.
The central finding of the chapter directly addresses a long-standing claim in the Effective Altruism community: that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others. We provide the first systematic evidence by comparing 24 charity evaluations from 4 different evaluators to test that claim, and the results are striking – the most effective charities outperformed typical high-income-country charities by roughly 1,000x.
For some charity specialists this result might not be that surprising, but we also ran a Prolific survey in which we asked two thousand normal people what they thought the difference between the best and average charities was. The average guess was only a 3x difference, showcasing the massive information gap we must still overcome when trying to educate the public about their donations.
To read more about where our 1000x figure comes from you can check our “Why some charities are 100s or even 1000s of times better than others” page on our website.
This year we also announced the publication of the Living Review of WELLBY Cost-Effectiveness Analyses, an exciting extension of our chapter in the World Happiness Report. Drawing on evaluations from four independent evaluators – not just ourselves – this resource empowers donors, policymakers, and researchers to direct funding where it can do the most good.
As new analyses emerge, this review will grow, making it an evolving, evidence-based tool for maximising happiness around the world.
Excitingly, we have been asked to consult on an update to HM Treasury’s Green Book wellbeing guidelines. This shows that our work in wellbeing methodology is cutting-edge and, we hope, will have an impact on how policies are evaluated.
And, our latest psychotherapy analysis (the basis for our StrongMinds and Friendship Bench recommendations) has been positively reviewed by The Unjournal with an average score of 86/100 from reviewers. You can also read our response to the review.
Our Director, Michael Plant, had one article, Can I Get A Little Less Life Satisfaction, Please published in Economics and Philosophy, which investigated where life satisfaction (and life satisfaction scores) is ultimately what matters for us. He had a co-authored another article, Moral Uncertainty, Proportionality and Bargaining which was in Ergo, advancing a new theory of how we should act when we are uncertain about morality (rather than the facts) - for instance if we’re uncertain whether happiness or life satisfaction matters. Both deal with important theoretical considerations for our work.
4. Where We Appeared in the Media This Year
One of our priorities this year was increasing the visibility of our research. Even the most useful analysis can’t create impact if the people who need it don’t read it, so we made a concerted effort to bring wellbeing-based giving into public conversation. Here are some of the media appearances that helped amplify our message:
Podcasts
5. What’s next for our research?
We are not resting on our current list of recommendations. We will continue to evaluate charities to find cost-effective ways of improving global wellbeing.
Over the coming year, we are not only keeping our charity recommendations up to date, but we are also pushing the frontier of what effective giving for happiness can achieve. We plan to evaluate new areas and charities, including palliative care, violence against women and girls, digital mental health, Action for Happiness and early childhood parenting support.
At the same time, we will strengthen the methodological backbone of wellbeing science, with a comparison between the priorities implied by happiness and life satisfaction scales.
We also intend to update and systematise our research methodology, including updating our views on time discounting and creating a centralised database of conversions, alongside other housekeeping improvements.
All of this work helps us ensure that, year after year, your donations flow to the opportunities that create the most additional happiness per pound, across more causes, more countries, and more robust evidence than ever before.
6. How you can help
You can make a difference today simply by giving what you can spare, joining our community and/or sharing our insights. Help make the world a happier place by:
- Donating to our recommended charities: Donate to our recommended charities through our website and become the most impactful person you know this Christmas.
- Donating to the Happier Lives Institute: Our research costs time and money! Support the Happier Lives Institute to keep shining the spotlight on fantastic charities.
- Staying informed: Sign up for our newsletter to receive updates and insights into effective giving opportunities.
- Advocate: Share these findings. Wellbeing matters and we can have a large impact by donating wisely!
We take happiness seriously. Do you?