Summary
What do they do? Malaria Consortium supports seasonal malaria chemoprevention and broader prevention, treatment, research and health-system work. The modeled recipient is UK charity 1099776/company 4785712. Do not assume the US affiliate has the same marginal allocation. More
Why this approach interests us
- Low-cost seasonal preventive medicine reduces childhood malaria in high-burden settings.
Our main reservations
- The whole-gift allocation and future survival are judgments. A major randomized trial reduced malaria but did not clearly reduce all-cause mortality.
What do you get for your dollar?
We charge the whole gift and quantify an assumed 50% malaria-prevention core. Direct SF and Bay Area health receives zero credit; this global estimate is not a local donation price. The remaining activity has unquantified health benefits. Inspect the whole-gift model.
- global best estimate
- $5,496 / 10 QALYs — Whole donor cash; conditional representative-core model.
- sf / bay
- Zero direct health credited — Unknown indirect effects receive no numerical credit.
- gift scope
- 50% quantified core — All costs charged; other health unquantified, not assumed worthless.
- full resources
- Unestimated — Donor cash is not a complete societal cost.
1. What do they do?
Malaria Consortium supports seasonal malaria chemoprevention and broader prevention, treatment, research and health-system work. The modeled recipient is UK charity 1099776/company 4785712. Do not assume the US affiliate has the same marginal allocation.
Support the whole organization
An ordinary unrestricted gift can support delivery or broader strategic priorities; a restricted SMC gift is a separate option.
Prevent seasonal malaria
Monthly medicine courses target high-risk transmission periods. Doses, full-season courses, cases avoided and deaths avoided are different units.
Count additional future health
Use a historical mortality benchmark with explicit allocation, age and timing assumptions, against already-funded care.
Scope of this review. The 50% core share is an analyst marginal-allocation prior, not an audited allocation or overhead rate. The other 50% remains in cost without quantified health.
2. Monitoring and information sharing
54 health posts in Senegal; age eligibility expanded from under five to under ten
Stepped-wedge cluster randomized trial; November 2016. Confirmed malaria fell 60% and severe malaria 45%. All-cause mortality RR .90 (95% CI .68–1.20) was not clearly reduced.
Our assessment. Supports morbidity prevention, not a direct randomized QALY or unrestricted-donation effect.
2022–24 SMC grants; summary updated August 2026
GiveWell historical funding-opportunity modeling. $4,000 per modeled life and $7 per child treated with a full course.
Our assessment. Already adjusted historical outcomes. Our allocation and QALY conversion are separate judgments, not another multiplication of trial efficacy.
Year ended March 31, 2025
Audited organizational accounts. £44.192M restricted SMC expenditure out of £69.192M total; unrestricted reserves exceeded the stated target.
Our assessment. Evidence of organizational scope and existing resources, not a causal next-dollar allocation.
3. Qualitative assessment
Low-cost seasonal preventive medicine reduces childhood malaria in high-burden settings.
Key reservations
- The 50% marginal core and 80/20 age mix are explicit priors, not observed portfolio statistics.
- The randomized mortality-null finding must remain visible alongside the modeled mortality benchmark.
- No verified current unfunded campaign or allocation is promised at this price.
- Do not give SMC and nets additive full credit for the same health under inconsistent counterfactuals.
Benefits not included in our estimate
- Noncore research, health-system and other health effects not modeled here.
- Separate income, education or morbidity benefits beyond the mortality conversion.
- Unmeasured SF/Bay spillovers or headquarters-based local allocations.
- Healthcare savings treated as donor cash or full societal costs.
4. What do you get for your dollar?
A $10,000 gift yields an estimated 18.1954 global QALYs.
The historical benchmark is $4,000 per modeled life saved. We assign 80% of deaths to an early-age trajectory and 20% to an older trajectory, both after an assumed 2.5-year delay. These age shares and finite survival curves are judgments, not measured portfolio outcomes or GiveWell moral weights.
A better life is our comparison unit of 10 additional quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), potentially spread across people. These are uncertain estimates, not measured returns or verified donation offers.
How we calculate the estimate
WHOLE-GIFT GLOBAL MODEL: ($10,000 × .50 / $4,000) × 14.55634 gift-time QALYs per modeled death
18.19543 QALYs; $100,000 / 18.19543 = $5,495.89 per 10 QALYs
Model inputs and assumptions
- Representative core allocation
- 50% (range: 10–80% in joint scenarios; zero-core null). Restricted SMC was 63.87% of FY2025 total expenditure, but that is not today's unrestricted margin. Broader strategic uses and reserves matter. Analyst judgment.
- Native mortality benchmark
- $4,000 / modeled life (range: $3,000–$6,500 scenario assumptions). GiveWell August 2026 summary of 2022–24 opportunities; not randomized deaths or a current quote. Historical evaluator model.
- Early / older death mix
- 80% / 20% (range: All early / all older). Provisional harmonized conversion prior; actual native SMC age composition remains unresolved. Analyst judgment.
- Finite remaining health
- 40 years early; 20 older (range: Three-year tails stress). Annual survival .99/.98, utility .85/.80, 3% discount; no extra generic persistence discount. Analyst judgment.
- Gift-to-event delay
- 2.5 years (range: 1–5 years). Not a measured current funding pipeline. Analyst judgment.
- Relative opportunity yield
- 1 (range: Half yield or zero). Transfers adjusted historical effectiveness to the represented core. No stacked efficacy, coverage or financing penalties. Analyst judgment.
What does an unrestricted gift support?
- central: $5,496 / 10 global QALYs. 18.195426 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- favorable-joint: $2,264 / 10 global QALYs. 44.162255 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- pessimistic-positive: $318,055 / 10 global QALYs. 0.314411 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- half-yield: $10,992 / 10 global QALYs. 9.097713 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- all-early: $5,050 / 10 global QALYs. 19.803260 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- all-older: $8,500 / 10 global QALYs. 11.764091 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- short-tail: $36,357 / 10 global QALYs. 2.750516 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- zero-core: No positive price / 10 global QALYs. 0.000000 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- zero-yield: No positive price / 10 global QALYs. 0.000000 global QALYs per $10,000. Assumption scenario, not a confidence bound.
- zero-yield-shared-harm: No positive price / 10 global QALYs. 0.000000 global QALYs per $10,000. Hypothetical new harm diagnostic, not an observed rate.
- zero-yield-independent-harm: No positive price / 10 global QALYs. -0.100000 global QALYs per $10,000. Hypothetical new harm diagnostic, not an observed rate.
- gross-resource-double: $10,992 / 10 global QALYs including gross resource allowance. 18.195426 global QALYs per $10,000. Adds an illustrative $10,000 associated-resource allowance; not net societal cost.
Uncertainty. Null allocation or yield gives no finite positive price. New shared harms scale with yield; independent gift-specific harms can persist when benefits are zero. Source-covered clinical harms are not charged twice. Resistance, serious reactions, survival catch-up and overlapping prevention programs remain uncertainties.
5. Funding and previous grants
The next unrestricted dollar's use and timing remain uncertain. This is a representative-gift model, not a guaranteed purchase or verified unfunded campaign.
FY2025 general reserves were above the stated target, with planned strategic deployment. The accounts do not prove an urgent unrestricted shortfall or zero marginal benefit. Existing national programs, grants and other donors are baseline. A matched full-resource/net societal cost is unknown; the double-resource scenario is only a gross associated-package stress.
This review does not establish a verified marginal funding offer or a complete history of grants.
Opens the organization’s giving page. A general donation may not fund the specific activity modeled here; confirm allocation with the recipient.
6. Sources
- Trustees' report and financial statements, FY2025, pages 32, 41 and 49. Malaria Consortium. Primary audited organizational accounts. Published: October 28, 2025; year ended March 31, 2025; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Donation FAQs: unrestricted versus restricted gifts. Malaria Consortium. Primary donation boundary. Published: Undated; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Donation and current delivery description. Malaria Consortium. Primary organizational description. Published: Undated; includes 2024 delivery figures; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- How We Produce Impact Estimates. GiveWell. Primary evaluator mortality model, not trial outcome. Published: Updated August 2026; 2022–24 grant averages; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
- Cissé et al.: seasonal malaria chemoprevention randomized trial. PLOS Medicine. Primary randomized clinical evidence. Published: November 22, 2016; retrieved: September 8, 2026.
Annual expenses: years and sources
Average annual expenses (three consecutive fiscal years): Not available. Organization size is separate from the modeled cost-effectiveness of a donation.
Malaria Consortium
Three years of organization-level expenses have not yet been verified for this report. No other organization or fiscal sponsor budget has been substituted.