Animal Welfare Fund: Payout recommendations from July to December 2025

By KarolinaSarek🔸, Neil_Dullaghan🔹 , Zoë Sigle 🔹, Ula Zarosa, Renata_Scarellis @ 2026-01-21T22:43 (+73)

Introduction

This payout report covers the Animal Welfare Fund's grantmaking from July 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025 (6 months). It follows the previous April-June 2025 payout report.

We combined Q3 and Q4 payout reports and the annual review into one report because our grantmaking volume was lower in Q3 as a result of EA Funds’ grantmaking pause, which ran from 1 June to 31 July. During the grantmaking pause, AWF focused on improving our grantmaking strategy and plans for the remainder of 2025. Since the pause was lifted in August, AWF started evaluations again as soon as possible and has resumed grantmaking at full volume for the rest of the year.

Overview of Q3 & Q4, 2025 grants

• Total funding approved: $2,482,552
• Total funding paid out: $944,428
• Number of grants approved: 21
• Number of grants paid out: 11
• Acceptance rate (excluding desk rejections): 21/37 = 56.8%
• Acceptance rate (including desk rejections): 21/134 = 15.7%

Highlighted Grants

Crustacean Compassion ($137,000): Advancing Legal Protections for Decapod Crustaceans in the UK

Annually, over 420 million decapod crustaceans—including prawns, lobsters, crab, and langoustine—are caught domestically in the UK, with an additional 5 billion imported. Despite their recognition as sentient in the UK's Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, which was achieved thanks to Crustacean Compassion and others' work, these animals still lack specific legal protections for humane slaughter, transport, and storage. Crustacean Compassion is one of the leading organizations working to translate this legal recognition into concrete welfare improvements. AWF provided $137,000 over two years to support their corporate engagement and policy advocacy work.

The grant supports a comprehensive strategy that covers the full path from policy to implementation. The central goal is securing Defra's publication of WATOK (Welfare at the Time of Killing), which would establish mandatory species-specific humane slaughter standards and ban inhumane methods like live boiling. But achieving policy change is only part of the challenge—the grant also funds continued corporate engagement through Crustacean Compassion's annual Snapshot benchmarking report, which publicly assesses retailers and food service companies on their decapod welfare practices and helps ensure that standards are actually adopted across the industry. Finally, the grant supports building an international coalition for decapod welfare research and advocacy, with the goal of involving at least 10 organizations during the grant period and sharing information through a website, virtual conference, shared research outputs, and advocacy toolkits–creating the infrastructure needed for sustained progress beyond the UK. Crustacean Compassion has demonstrated they can execute this approach: in addition to their instrumentality in achieving decapods' inclusion in the Sentience Act, their Snapshot reporting now covers companies responsible for 90% of all retailed decapods in the UK, with over two-thirds adopting welfare policies where none previously existed. AWF views this as a high-counterfactual opportunity—Crustacean Compassion is the primary actor driving policy progress for decapods in the UK, and success could establish a precedent that influences EU and international standards.

Rethink Priorities ($214,678): Strategic Leadership and Flexible Funding for the Neglected Animals Program

Insects, shrimp, and wild animals represent the most numerous yet most neglected animals affected by human activity—trillions of individuals receiving a fraction of available welfare funding. Rethink Priorities has played a foundational role in establishing these as priority areas, with their research prompting other organizations to take action and informing funders regarding these species. Based on these previous successes, AWF provided Rethink Priorities with $214,678 to fund a Program Lead position and flexible response fund for their Neglected Animals Program.

Despite their strong track record, Rethink Priorities lacks the unrestricted funding necessary to provide cross-program leadership and respond quickly to emerging opportunities without diverting resources from existing program areas. This grant addresses that bottleneck by funding a Program Lead who will provide strategic coordination across the program's three focus areas: developing new shrimp welfare interventions and improving data collection; advancing other invertebrate welfare through corporate partnerships, standards development, and research; and scoping out tractable, cost-effective and low-risk wild animal welfare interventions. The flexible fund complements this leadership capacity by enabling timely responses to policy windows and unforeseen opportunities without diverting resources from planned priorities. Without this capacity, promising opportunities risk being missed and existing restricted funding may not achieve its potential impact.

Star Farm Pakistan ($47,000): Cage-free work in Pakistan 

Pakistan has the 13th highest population of layer hens globally, with approximately 108 million birds alive at any one time, yet the scale of cage-free advocacy work in the country remains small. Recognizing this gap, AWF recommended a grant to Star Farm Pakistan to establish the country's first structured cage-free egg supply chain by securing corporate sourcing commitments and linking them with certified cage-free farms. The grant will support engagement with major corporate buyers—including retailers, hotels, and food service chains—and provide technical support to farms seeking cage-free certification.

Star Farm Pakistan brings unique advantages to this work as a subsidiary of METRO Group (a large wholesale cash & carry chain), providing direct market access through METRO stores and establishing relationships with multinational companies operating in Pakistan. The organization previously developed Pakistan's first national cage-free standard, which is currently pending approval by the regulatory authority.

This grant focuses primarily on the formal market segment—large retailers and international food chains that purchase in bulk and can set visible procurement benchmarks. Success in the formal market could create spillover effects, as informal markets in Pakistan have historically adapted to consumer expectations set by modern retailers. 

Grants Funded with AWF’s Partners

As described previously, AWF has increased collaboration with other funders, either through recommending particular funding opportunities that meet partners' criteria or through co-funding. This quarter, we recommended the following grants:

• Recommendation to a partner organization:
  • International Council for Animal Welfare (ICAW) ($148,000)
    • 1-year grant to continue shrimp corporate campaigns in 2026
  • OBRAZ - Obranci zvirat, z. s ($200,00)
    • Defending the unique Czech cage ban and cage-free transition, and campaigning for a better broiler welfare

All Grants We Approved During This Time Period

Below is a full list of all 11 grants, totaling $944,428, that the Animal Welfare Fund disbursed during this period. 

Updated 2025 Grantmaking Overview

In November 2025, we shared an overview of our grantmaking for the year. Since then, we've recommended additional grants in November and December, so we want to share updated totals for all grants made since our 2024 annual report.

In the last year, AWF significantly expanded its grantmaking to address the most pressing challenges in farmed animal welfare, recommending 54 grants totaling $5.39 million. 

Below is an overview of how grants made since the 2024 report are distributed across regions, species, and intervention types.

By region

By species

* Multiple Farmed Animals also includes meta interventions, which have an overarching impact.

By intervention type 

Organizational updates

Throughout 2025, AWF has continued to evolve and strengthen our operations, increase our fundraising, and refine our grantmaking strategy:

• Operations:
  • Spun out from Effective Ventures and merged with CEA: This year, EA Funds completed its spin-out from Effective Ventures and merged with the Centre for Effective Altruism. This transition provides AWF with stronger institutional foundations, dedicated operational support, and integration with CEA's established infrastructure. Grant recommendations continue to be made by our fund managers, and our grantmaking approach remains unchanged. We believe this merger positions AWF for more sustainable long-term growth while maintaining the independence and rigor of our grant evaluation process.
• Transparency:
  • Updated the EA Funds website: We launched a modernized EA Funds website featuring improved navigation, clearer explanations of our evaluation process, and better accessibility for both donors and potential grantees.
  • Continued publishing regular payout reports: We maintained our commitment to publishing detailed payout reports, providing comprehensive information about our grants, their intended impact, and outcomes.
• Grant Evaluation:
  • Updated our monitoring, evaluation, and learning process: We implemented an enhanced MEL framework focused on tracking grantees' progress toward specific, pre-defined goals. Under this system, applicants submit measurable objectives as part of their application, and our fund managers establish success/failure criteria during evaluation. This systematic approach allows us to learn from both successes and failures, improving our future grantmaking decisions.
• Strategy:
  • Refined our three-year grantmaking strategy: We published our three-year grantmaking strategy, refining AWF's top priority areas. The strategy focuses on filling critical gaps in the animal advocacy ecosystem, prioritizing large and neglected groups of animals as well as farmed animals in the Global South. Key objectives include ending cage confinement for hens globally, improving aquatic animal welfare, making humane slaughter the default for farmed shrimp, protecting neglected species from emerging intensive systems, reducing wild animal suffering at scale, and transforming farm animal welfare across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
• Grantmaking:
  • Made grants with our partner organization, Effektiv Spenden: We launched a partner funding model, which allows us to leverage our comparative advantage in grant evaluation even for grants we don’t have the funds to support. For these grants, AWF evaluates the proposal and recommends it to the partner organization for funding. The partner completes due diligence, issues the grant agreement, and pays out the grant, while AWF continues to receive progress reports to track outcomes, collectively ensuring that the movement has more resources and those resources are directed to causes with highest marginal cost-effectiveness. In 2025, we recommended $508,000 in funding across 4 grants to our partner organization Effektiv Spenden.
• Funding:
  • Exceeded historic fundraising records and developed ambitious future plans: 2025 was a strong year for fundraising. We raised $10M - more than twice what we raised in 2024 and more than the previous two years combined, enabling us to sustain our ambitious grantmaking. However, our grantmaking strategy calls for deploying $20M+ annually, so we still have significant room for more funding.