Episode
Behind the Planet Money ALIMA Grant Story
- Podcast
- GiveWell Conversations
- Published
- Dec 9, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2063
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/f3641a71
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/givewell-conversations-7260294/episodes/behind-the-planet-money-alima-grant-story/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/givewell-conversations-7260294/behind-the-planet-money-alima-grant-story.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
This episode follows up on the November 26, 2025 episode of Planet Money , “Saving lives with fewer dollars,” which covered GiveWell’s evaluation of a grant to the Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA) to maintain primary healthcare, hospital services, and malnutrition treatment in two subdistricts of North Cameroon following unexpected aid cuts earlier this year. We recommend listening to the Planet Money episode first, as it provides important context. *** Significant changes to foreign aid this year created challenges for implementing organizations—and for funders evaluating which programs to support with limited resources. The Planet Money team followed along as we assessed the effects of the cuts in real time, focusing on our evaluation of a potential grant to ALIMA to maintain nutrition and primary healthcare services in Cameroon. Following the announcement of the US government’s stop-work order and funding freeze in January, we created a rapid response research team and began assessing opportunities we thought were potentially highly cost effective. In March, we launched an investigation of the $1.9 million ALIMA grant, which we funded in June based on the team’s findings. In this episode, GiveWell CEO and co-founder Elie Hassenfeld dives deeper into the grant investigation with Program Officers Rosie Bettle and Alice Redfern, discussing the timeline, modeling approach, and what ultimately led us to make the grant. Elie, Rosie, and Alice discuss: The grant investigation timeline: GiveWell completed the investigation in about six weeks from start to finish. Typically, GiveWell grant investigations build on months or years of prior research. While we’ve researched and funded malnutrition programs in the past (including ALIMA’s programs), this program’s…