Effective Altruism Funds
Animal Welfare Fund
The Animal Welfare Fund aims to improve the wellbeing of nonhuman animals by making grants that focus on one or more best-in-class opportunities.
What problem is the Animal Welfare Fund working on?
The Animal Welfare Fund aims to effectively improve the wellbeing of nonhuman animals by making grants that focus on one or more of the following:
- Relatively neglected geographic regions or groups of animals.
- Promising research into animal advocacy or animal wellbeing.
- Activities that could make it easier to help animals in the future.
- Otherwise best-in-class opportunities.
What projects does the Animal Welfare Fund support?
The Fund focuses on projects that primarily address farmed animals, as well as projects that could affect other large populations of nonhuman animals. Some examples of projects that the Fund could support:
- Supporting farmed animal advocacy in Asia.
- Researching ways to improve the welfare of farmed fish.
- Promoting alternative proteins in order to reduce demand for animal products.
- Advocating against the use of some cruel practice within the industrial agriculture system.
- Growing the field of welfare biology in order to improve our understanding of different ways to address wild animal suffering.
Recent past grant recipients include:
- Fish Welfare Initiative — support to expand producer, corporate, and policy work in India.
- Animals Aotearoa — the only NGO working on chicken corporate welfare commitments in New Zealand.
- Vegetarian Society of Denmark — to support securing government funding for R&D on plant-based alternatives.
- Advocates for Animals — increasing capacity of an organisation providing legal support for effective animal advocacy organisations in the UK, and considering conducting judicial reviews related to farmed animals.
- Animal Rights Organization EVA — campaigning for implementation of Animal Protection Law in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- Animal Advocacy Africa — supporting African animal advocacy organisations with fundraising and piloting similar work in Asia.
- Animal Empathy Philippines — community building on effective animal advocacy in the Philippines.
- Sentient Media — providing digital marketing, training, and content production for high-impact farmed animal advocacy groups.
For more information about how donations are allocated, see the list of past recipients and frequently asked questions on the EA Funds website.
Why do we include the Animal Welfare Fund on our list of recommended programs?
We investigated the Animal Welfare Fund as part of our 2023 evaluator investigations and determined that it is a great choice for donors wishing to maximise the impact of their “dollar” in the animal welfare space. See the full report here.
At Giving What We Can, we focus on the effectiveness of an organisation's work -- what the organisation is actually doing and whether their programs are making a big difference. Some others in the charity recommendation space focus instead on the ratio of admin costs to program spending, part of what we’ve termed the “overhead myth.” See why overhead isn’t the full story and learn more about our approach to charity evaluation.