Treat a severely malnourished child through to recovery.
Community health workers in Gombe State, Nigeria, find the children, treat them with ready-to-use therapeutic food and basic medicine, and follow each one until they are well.
Choose your ripple
Every.org passes your gift to Taimaka and sends the receipt; it suggests a tip you can set to zero. Or give on taimaka.org.
Severe acute malnutrition is a child so undernourished that ordinary food will not bring them back. It is treated with ready-to-use therapeutic food, a fortified peanut paste, together with antibiotics, over several weeks of weekly visits. Untreated, a large share of these children die. Treated in the community rather than in hospital, most recover.
- MalnutritionWorld Health OrganizationThe fact sheet on wasting, stunting and what severe acute malnutrition does to a child.
- Hunger and undernourishmentOur World in DataWhere undernourishment is concentrated and how it has changed.
- Community management of acute malnutritionGiveWellHow outpatient treatment with therapeutic food works and what it costs.
Cost per child is GiveWell's figure. The cost-per-life range in the evidence panel is Taimaka's own model.
The figures
What Taimaka does
Taimaka runs outpatient treatment for severe acute malnutrition out of government health facilities in Gombe State, in northeastern Nigeria. Community health workers, rather than doctors and nurses, screen children, hand out ready-to-use therapeutic food and antibiotics, and see each case weekly until recovery. About 93% of admitted children recover.
How GiveWell gets there
GiveWell reviewed Taimaka's program, cost and monitoring data before granting $4.8 million in November 2024 for three years of treatment, expected to reach around 45,000 children, and a further $0.5 million in 2025 for monitoring. Its model puts the program at roughly nine times the cost-effectiveness of cash, just under its funding bar, with a renewal decision due in 2026. Happier Lives Institute modelled the same program in wellbeing terms and estimates $15 per WELLBY.
What could be wrong
- GiveWell's estimate sits just below its own funding bar, and GiveWell says so. This is a promising program it is still learning about, not a Top Charity with a decade of evidence behind it.
- The cost-per-life-saved range is Taimaka's own model. We show it because readers ask, and flag it because nobody independent has reproduced it.
- GiveWell's stated uncertainties: how much death treatment actually averts, whether Taimaka can scale, what using less-qualified health workers does to quality of care, and whether the program displaces government services.
- The funding gaps are real and dated. Happier Lives Institute reports $400,000 unfilled for 2026 and $1.45 million for 2027, and a gap that closes changes what the next dollar does.
Every figure is an average program cost, not a receipt. How we phrase things.