Presenting five new charities from our 2025 Spring cohort!

We are thrilled to introduce five new charities from our 2025 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program Spring Cohort! Collectively, they have secured over $650,000 in seed funding to kickstart their ventures. Read on to learn more about these newly incubated organisations and how you can support their journeys.

• Respira Health: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. Rehabilitation programmes combining breathing exercises, physiotherapy, and lifestyle guidance significantly improve patient outcomes. Respira Health will provide a free mobile-based rehabilitation programme for patients in underserved regions in India, offering accessible care patients can use anytime, anywhere.

  
  

• Scale Welfare: Finding the most cost-effective solutions to improve farmed fish welfare in Southeast Asia: A practical research and development organisation which will test and identify pathways to improving the lives of millions of farmed fish, initially exploring opportunities in the Philippines and Vietnam.

  
  

• Radius Institute for Road Safety: Road crashes kill 1.2 million people each year—more than HIV/AIDS and malaria combined—with LMICs suffering the highest burden. The Radius Institute will tackle this crisis by identifying the most effective safety policies, like speed management, and running local pilots to test the policy's efficacy and viability before scaling them nationally.

  
  

• Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Initiative (LABRI): Unsafe lead-acid battery recycling is responsible for up to 30% of lead poisoning worldwide - 350,000 deaths each year. Market policies have worked in shifting incentives and cost-effectively reducing this burden. This new organisation will provide governments with the data and tools they need to implement these effective policies.

  
  

• Center for Policy Innovation (India): Indian states spend $100 billion every year on a few large welfare programs. But many of these programs fall short on effectiveness. We help states shift to more cost-effective alternatives by offering a curated menu of better programs, backed by polling data to show voter appeal, and supporting adoption.

Respira Health

Closing the treatment gap for the world’s fourth deadliest disease.

Cofounders: Rowan Lund, Oli Munns

Why?

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide. It’s a degenerative lung condition, primarily caused by smoking and air pollution, which leads to respiratory and heart failure. It kills more than 3 million people every year and 90% of these deaths are in low- and middle-income countries.

While pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is a proven, cost-effective treatment, access in LMICs is severely limited due to healthcare workforce shortages and logistical barriers. Digital PR offers a breakthrough: the same life-extending care, accessible anytime, anywhere.

Our first year will be spent building and testing our digital solution. Our focus is on evaluating our current assumptions and building a model that we can scale in the following years.

Plans

We have two initial priorities:

1. Improve our understanding of the needs of COPD patients in the highest burden regions in India, and

2. Develop a simple digital pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) programme that we can test with COPD patients.

To this end, we will be visiting India in the next couple of months with the following aims:

• Understand the existing diagnosis and treatment processes

• Conduct needs assessments with COPD patients

• Build relationships with healthcare workers, hospital staff and local NGOs

• Test a simple PR model

We are most excited to test simple and highly adaptable models such as WhatsApp chatbots and web-based platforms where we can learn and iterate quickly to suit the needs of COPD patients in our target regions.

Where

We have not yet decided on specific regions within India, and we will use the next couple of months to make this decision based on where the health burden is highest, where our digital solution is feasible, and where there is a large treatment gap.

Goals

Our cost-effectiveness model suggests we could avert a DALY for just $20 at scale - 5x more cost-effective than GiveWell’s bar. In our first year, we aim to confirm uptake and adherence in low-resource settings, paving the way for broader national and regional scale-up by year two.

How you can support us

We’re currently looking for connections in the digital health space, funders for the next couple of years, and potential hospital and research partners in India to help shape and scale this intervention. If you are connected to anyone who would be useful for us to speak to, or if you have experience in digital health, hospital-based interventions in LMICs, or simply want to help us close the COPD treatment gap then we’d love to speak with you!

Scale Welfare

Improving Farmed Fish Welfare in Asia

Cofounders: Koen van Pelt & Ameer Virani

Why?

Farmed fish are suffering at a huge scale but are extremely neglected, especially in Asia.

Over 70 billion farmed fish live through months of suffering before being inhumanely killed every year. 90% of these farmed fish are in Asia, yet only a few early-stage organisations with limited resources are working to improve their welfare.

One of these organisations, Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI), has achieved success but was able to help less than 0.001% of the total Asian farmed fish population in 2024. The suffering of farmed fish in Asia is a problem of unfathomable magnitude and it is getting worse, so additional resources and organisations are urgently needed.

Plans

We will build on existing research and start by testing two intervention hypotheses:

• The Philippines: Work with farmers to improve milkfish welfare

• Vietnam: Engage corporations to improve the welfare of pangasius exports

Both intervention hypotheses and countries show promising signs for tractability and have available talent to make progress, yet they remain neglected.

During Year 1, we will conduct research and field tests to identify a potentially highly cost-effective and scalable intervention model. From Year 2 onwards, we will pilot and scale this intervention in the more promising country.

Goals

It is estimated that a water quality intervention to improve fish welfare could avert 44.6 SADs/$, in line with FWI’s similar work in India. This is just our benchmark and we believe we can uncover significantly more impactful paths, like Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) did with its stunning-based slaughter intervention that now helps over 3 billion shrimp per year.

Our Year 1 goal is to run a focused year of research and field testing, with the support of local hires, to identify and prepare one promising intervention to pilot in Year 2—one with the potential to improve the lives of millions of fish.

How you can support us

• We are keen to connect with anyone working in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam

• We are looking for advisors with a working knowledge of one or more parts of the farmed fish supply chain (e.g. fish feed producers, equipment suppliers, vaccine producers, farmed fish wholesalers, retailers, government authorities)

Radius Institute for Road Safety

Providing local data, evidence-based insights, and hands-on technical assistance to end road traffic deaths and serious injuries.

Founder: Larissa Vaughan-Rowe

Why?

Road crashes annually claim 1.2 million lives and injure 50 million more—exceeding the toll of HIV/AIDS and malaria combined, yet receiving only a third of malaria's funding. They are the leading cause of death for those aged 5-29 and cost $3.6 trillion globally. Low and middle-income countries bear 92% of fatalities despite having only 60% of vehicles, with some losing over 6% of GDP to crashes.

Most crashes are preventable. Measures—like speed limits, reducing drink-driving, and promoting seatbelts, child restraints, and helmets—can save lives. Of these, speed management likely offers the highest impact. A 5% reduction in average speed can reduce fatal crashes by 30%, yet only 35% of countries follow WHO speed policy recommendations.

Plans

The Radius Institute tackles road safety through evidence-based policy advancement. In Q2 2025, we're conducting desk research and speaking to experts to finalize our initial policy focus (likely speed management) and target countries. We will then shift to learning by doing in Q3.

In our first year of operation, we plan to:

1. Identify the points of highest leverage: Pinpoint the most impactful interventions across crash risk factors (e.g., speed) and policy levels (e.g., local vs national) to ensure we are focusing our resources whereever will best reduce fatalities and serious injuries.

2. Run local pilots: Street or city-level pilots with municipal partners will allow us start saving lives early while refining our policy asks through practical experience.

   
   

Goals

Road safety policy has the potential to be highly cost effective. We estimate speed policy interventions could cost as little as $8 per DALY (Disability-Adjusted Life Year) averted or $550 per life saved at scale. These estimates are in line with other estimates such as the Rethink Priorities report on road safety and evaluations of Bloomberg Philanthropies' road safety initiatives.

How you can support us

We would especially benefit from (a) connections in road safety and policy and (b) advisors for the organization.

Types of connections that would be especially valuable:

1. Road safety experts in academia, NGOs, governments, and urban planning;

2. Staff at key road safety organizations and initiatives such as Bloomberg, Vital Strategies, World Bank's Global Road Safety Facility (GRSF), Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit (JH-IIRU), or the Red Cross’ Global Road Safety Partnership.

3. Policy experts, especially those with experience in Sub-Saharan Africa.

If you can make introductions or may be able to act as an advisor, please reach out. Email larissa@radiusinstitute.com or connect on LinkedIn.

Please also subscribe to our newsletter for future updates.

LABRI

Ending the cycle of toxic battery waste

Cofounders: Micaella Rogers, Tom Daniels

Why?

Lead-acid batteries are the main use of lead globally. However, unsafe recycling of used lead-acid batteries (ULAB) poses major human health risks, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Recyclers seldom adopt adequate safety controls, leading to the contamination of air, water and soil and exposing workers and surrounding residents to dangerous levels of lead. This lead exposure leads to severe health risks, including neurological damage in children. Lead exposure is estimated to cause IQ loss, behavioural disorders, and over 1 million deaths annually. Despite this, the problem of ULAB recycling remains largely neglected and unregulated in many countries.

Plans

In our first year of operation, we’re hoping to:

• Partner with a government - Establish a partnership with a government in our first country of priority to implement policies that will improve the quality of ULAB recycling (such as deposit-refund schemes to incentivise market formalisation, and extended producer responsibility to incentivise responsible supply chain management).

• Collect data on the problem - Collect local, country-specific data on the scale and harms of LAB recycling in at least two countries and share those insights with government and civil society stakeholders.

• Generate evidence on solutions - Model the impacts of recycling process improvements on human health, through desktop research, expert engagement and in-country observation.

Goals

Initial modelling suggests we could avert one DALY-equivalent for $12 and reduce lead exposure for over 3 million children annually when at scale

How you can support us

We are particularly keen to speak to advisors with experience related to:

• Waste management and waste management policy (especially in low- and middle-income countries);

• Effecting policy change in Sub-Saharan Africa; and

• Policies that seek to shift market dynamics.

Please reach out to us if you have any relevant experience in these areas, or would like to learn more about our plans.

Centre for Policy Innovation (Indian Welfare Reform)

Cofounders: Haindavi Kandarpa, Uttej K

Why?

The Problem—Indian states spend over $100 billion every year on a few large welfare programs. But many of these programs fall short on effectiveness, resulting in a massive missed opportunity to lift 600 million people out of poverty.

The Solution—We improve the cost-effectiveness of this spending by advocating welfare alternatives that are both effective and electorally viable. We do this by offering leaders a clear menu of effective alternatives, backing them with polling data to show political viability, and providing hands-on support for adoption.

Just as GiveWell transformed philanthropy with cost-effectiveness benchmarking, we aim to do the same for India’s large welfare programs.

Plans

We plan to launch our pilot in the next 3 months. In year 1, we aim to test a menu of cost-effective welfare alternatives, run polling to assess public appeal, and advocate for these better programs with key decision makers.

As our model is highly leveraged, even small improvements in large welfare programs can yield a massive impact. We estimate a cost-effectiveness of <$4 per DALY averted or ~$200 to save a life.

How you can support us

We’re looking for introductions to experts in welfare programs, relevant LMIC policy think tanks, and Indian political strategists and bureaucrats. In the upcoming months, we’ll be seeking research support to help shape our high-impact recommendations. We also plan to launch a newsletter soon - if interested, please sign up here!