LEEP seeks to eliminate lead poisoning across the globe by advocating for policies that prevent lead exposure, such as ending the sale and manufacture of lead paint worldwide.
An estimated 815 million children — one in three — around the globe have dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstreams, which can hinder their cognitive development and limit their future potential. 94% of these children are in low- and middle-income countries. In addition, adverse health effects related to lead poisoning account for 1% of the global disease burden, including causing 1 million premature deaths annually.
LEEP’s mission is to eliminate childhood lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing, and potential of children worldwide. Its paint programs aim to end the market availability of lead paint with a five-step approach:
In the past four years, LEEP has:
If progress continues as expected, LEEP estimates that its programs will reduce lead poisoning in tens of millions of children.
We previously included LEEP as one of our recommended charities based on Founders Pledge’s evaluation highlighting its cost-effectiveness. Founders Pledge found that:
Other indicators of LEEP’s effectiveness include:
We’ve since updated our recommendations to reflect only organisations recommended by evaluators we’ve looked into as part of our evaluator investigations and chosen to rely on; as such, we don't currently include LEEP as one of our recommended programs but you can still donate to it via our donation platform.
We have varying degrees of information about the cost-effectiveness of our supported programs. We have more information about programs that impact-focused evaluators (some of which our research team expects to investigate soon as part of their evaluator investigations) have looked into, as well as programs that we’ve previously included on our list of recommended charities. We think it’s important to share the information we have with donors as we expect it will be useful in their donation decisions, but don’t want donors to mistakenly overweight the extent to which we share information about some charities and not others. Therefore, we want to clarify two things: