Protect one child for a whole year.
Two vitamin A doses a year, from six months to five years old, measurably lowers a child's chance of dying.
Choose your ripple
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Vitamin A keeps a child's immune system and eyes working. Where diets are short of it, a child who catches measles or a bad bout of diarrhoea is far more likely to die of it. Two high-dose capsules a year, from six months to five years old, measurably lower that risk, and cost almost nothing to deliver alongside campaigns that already exist.
- Vitamin A supplementationGiveWellThe trials behind supplementation and how much child mortality it reduces.
- Child mortalityOur World in DataHow child deaths have fallen, where they still happen, and from what.
- MicronutrientsWorld Health OrganizationWhy vitamin A deficiency weakens a child's immune system and sight.
The figures
The same figure, across GiveWell's picks
- Child Survival$3,500
- Malaria Medicine$4,000
- Childhood Vaccines$4,500
- Malaria Nets$5,500
Lower is cheaper per life saved. All of them sit far inside GiveWell's funding bar; the spread between them is small next to the spread between any of them and an unevaluated charity.
What Helen Keller Intl does
Helen Keller Intl supports national vitamin A supplementation campaigns: the technical assistance, the logistics, and the funding gap that keeps a country's twice-yearly campaign running.
How GiveWell gets there
The underlying evidence is a set of randomised trials showing meaningful reductions in child mortality from vitamin A supplementation. GiveWell then adjusts hard for present-day conditions: whether deficiency is still widespread in a given country, whether the government would have funded the campaign anyway, and how much of the trial-era effect should still be expected today.
What could be wrong
- The trials behind vitamin A supplementation are decades old, and child mortality has fallen a great deal since. GiveWell explicitly discounts the expected effect for this, and reasonable researchers disagree about how large the discount should be.
- Cost per death averted spans nearly an order of magnitude depending on the country. The low end is not the typical case.
- This is a supplement delivered alongside existing national campaigns, not a standalone clinic. The counterfactual, what happens without this funding, is a real part of the estimate.
Every figure is an average program cost, not a receipt. How we phrase things.