Lead Exposure
Overview
Lead poisoning is the silent pandemic we rarely talk about—yet it is stealing futures on a staggering scale. One in three children—an estimated 800 million worldwide—have blood-lead levels high enough to impair brain development. That means lost IQ points, lower lifetime earnings, and a lifelong drag on national prosperity. Meanwhile, lead-driven heart disease, kidney damage and other illnesses now kill about 1.5 million people each year and sap 21 million DALYs (disability adjusted life years) from the global ledger—even more than malaria.
Yet funding to fix the problem remains vanishingly small. Analysts estimate that all the NGOs working on lead in low- and middle-income countries spend just US$6–10 million a year - roughly US$0.31 per DALY of burden. Contrast that with HIV/AIDS, which receives around US$210 of development assistance for every lost DALY it causes. In other words, the world invests around 600 times more per unit of harm in HIV than in lead exposure, making lead one of the most neglected issues in global health.
The tragedy is not only the scale of harm, but how avoidable it is. Proven, low-cost actions—phasing out lead paint, regulating backyard battery-recycling, testing blood-lead levels, and enforcing food-safety rules—can slash exposure for just a few dollars per child. Pilot programmes show that as little as $11 spent can avert an entire year of ill-health, and unlock many more dollars in lifetime income gains.
Momentum is finally building: in 2024 USAID, UNICEF and major philanthropies launched the US$150 million Partnership for a Lead-Free Future, but the gap between need and resources is still vast.
Why should you care? Because eliminating lead is a triple win - healthier children, smarter economies, and a fairer world—achievable for pennies on the dollar compared with better-known threats.
Our full report dives into the data, country success stories, and ideas for ways to help.
Leading Organisations and Initiatives
There are many fantastic organisations working to combat lead exposure. Here are some of our top picks:
Lead Exposure Action Fund (LEAF): A significant philanthropic fund (over $100 million committed) focused on accelerating progress towards a lead-free world through grantmaking for measurement, mitigation, and mainstreaming of lead exposure, primarily in LMICs.
Partnership for a Lead-Free Future: A key initiative, housed at UNICEF. LEAF is a member and funds the secretariat.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): Provides training on lead prevention programs, including blood lead testing, surveillance, linkage to services, and policy interventions.
World Health Organisation (WHO): Defines lead as a major public health concern, provides guidelines for clinical management.
Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP): A non-governmental organisation that works on measuring lead content in paint and working with government and industry for its elimination.
Pure Earth: A non-governmental organisation that identifies and remediates toxic sites, conducts market screenings for lead in consumer products, and implements on-the-ground interventions (e.g., in Bangladesh and Georgia).
Center for Global Development (CGD): Produces extensive research and policy documents on the global lead poisoning crisis, highlighting its scale, data gaps, effective interventions, and opportunities for action by entities like the G7.
Lead Research for Action (LeRA): Conducts research to identify and eliminate causes of childhood lead poisoning.
Further reading
If you’ve read Albion East’s report on lead exposure and want to dive into more detail, here are some of our recommendations - many from the partners above:
Global health burden and cost of lead exposure in children and adults (the Lancet)
Understanding childhood lead poisoning levels and sources (UNICEF)
How Much Would Reducing Lead Exposure Improve Children’s Learning in the Developing World (CGD)
Considerations for Planning Childhood Blood Lead Surveillance (Vital Strategies)
The Toxic Truth (Pure Earth + UNICEF)
Opportunities to give
If you’re an individual or organisation looking to directly support work combatting lead exposure, there are a number of options think are likely to be particularly impactful from the list above. Albion East presently donates to LEEP and Pure Earth - two longstanding and highly-evidenced effective institutions - along with LeRA, which is more newly formed but we judge has an excellent team and strong potential to deliver outstanding results through its lead content survey work.
There are a number of new initiatives and organisations seeking to deliver impact in this area, so we will update this list over time as promising opportunities emerge.