Fonds Tierleid verringern

The “Improving Animal Welfare” fund, run by Effektiv Spenden, pools donations from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and grants them to organisations that reduce the suffering of farmed animals. The roles are separate: the EA Animal Welfare Fund researches and issues concrete funding recommendations, while Effektiv Spenden raises the money and decides on allocation every six months together with that fund’s managers.¹

Why “Improving Animal Welfare” matters

In 2022, 83 billion land animals were slaughtered worldwide for meat production, the vast majority of them chickens. Most of these animals live in intensive systems, and the figure does not include fish and other aquatic animals killed.²

Very little money goes to the field. At Effektiv Spenden, animal welfare accounted for only about 6% of donation volume in 2024, roughly €1.5 million. Lewis Bollard of the farm animal welfare team at Coefficient Giving describes the global movement as a few thousand full-time people who have less money available in a year than the meat company JBS takes in over two days.³

How the fund selects

The fund is modelled on the EA Animal Welfare Fund; Effektiv Spenden decides on allocation together with that fund’s managers, every six months rather than continuously, so it can respond to time-critical opportunities.¹ Effektiv Spenden bases this choice of research partner on Giving What We Can’s assessment in its “Evaluate the Evaluators” project and on the farm animal welfare team at Coefficient Giving, formerly Open Philanthropy.³ In earlier rounds the fund also worked with Animal Charity Evaluators and Focus Philanthropy.¹

The fund explicitly supports organisations that Effektiv Spenden does not carry as a top recommendation: small or time-limited initiatives for which a permanent listing on the platform would not be appropriate.¹ The work funded is mostly corporate campaigning for higher welfare standards, policy work, and campaigns for the welfare of aquatic animals.

Who is supported

The money currently flowing comes from the H2/2025 round. From German and Swiss donations, about €476,000 each went to Sinergia Animal, for animal protection in Southeast Asia and South America mainly through corporate campaigns, and to The Humane League, for corporate campaigns against the cruellest forms of farming. A further €180,000 from Austria went to The Humane League for an activist training project.¹

Earlier rounds:

• H1/2025: OBRAZ, €137,400, for implementing the Czech ban on cages for laying hens from 2027; International Council for Animal Welfare, €128,478, for corporate campaigns on shrimp welfare; Animal Welfare Observatory, €86,500, for broiler standards in Spanish retail; Humánny Pokrok, €51,000, for a national broiler campaign in Slovakia; Sinergia Animal, €21,500.¹
• H2/2024: Sinergia Animal, €286,000; The Humane League, €180,000; Animal Policy International, €55,000. Transferred in April 2025.¹
• H1/2024: Sinergia Animal, €198,000; The Humane League, €163,000; Çiftlik Hayvanlarını Koruma Derneği, €55,000. Transferred in October 2024.¹

Impact and transparency

Effektiv Spenden publishes every allocation round on the fund page, with recipients, amounts and the date the money was transferred, and accompanies each round with a detailed blog post.¹⁴

The recommendations of Animal Charity Evaluators are an independent check. The Humane League had its Recommended Charity status renewed in November 2025, Sinergia Animal has held it since 2024, and the Animal Welfare Observatory was newly added in 2025.⁵ Sinergia Animal is being re-evaluated in 2026, with the result due on 10 November 2026.⁶

What the fund does not provide is a cost-effectiveness estimate of its own. Neither for the fund as a whole nor for individual grants is there a published figure for what a donated euro achieves. Several recipients, among them Humánny Pokrok, OBRAZ and the International Council for Animal Welfare, have not been comprehensively assessed by any evaluator; there the judgement of the EA Animal Welfare Fund stands alone.

Why we fund “Improving Animal Welfare”

In no other field we pay out to is the ratio of affected creatures to available money this extreme. We fund the fund rather than a single organisation because the most effective opportunities in animal welfare are often small, national and time-limited: a campaign to enforce a cage ban in Czechia, or to introduce stunning of shrimp before slaughter, does not work as a permanent address, but it does work as a grant reassessed every six months. That allocation follows the recommendations of an established research partner, that much of the money goes to organisations independently recommended by Animal Charity Evaluators, and that every round is published with amounts and recipients, together make the decision one we can follow. Wealth for the World therefore pays out to this fund.

Footnotes

1. Effektiv Spenden, “Spendenfonds: Tierleid verringern”. effektiv-spenden.org ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

2. Our World in Data, “More than 80 billion land animals are slaughtered for meat every year”. ourworldindata.org; Our World in Data, “Animal Welfare”. ourworldindata.org ↩

3. Effektiv Spenden, “Spendenempfehlungen 2025”. effektiv-spenden.org ↩ ↩²

4. Effektiv Spenden, “Our giving fund: Reducing animal suffering in H1/2025”. effektiv-spenden.org ↩

5. Animal Charity Evaluators, “Announcing our 2025 Charity Recommendations”. animalcharityevaluators.org ↩

6. Animal Charity Evaluators, “Announcing the Charities Under Evaluation in 2026”. animalcharityevaluators.org ↩