Let me preface this article by saying that I am an international development professional who has been living and working in West Africa for years. I am a fan of the underlying principles of effective altruism, that we need to invest in charities that do the most good, but I am very concerned with the methods used for choosing these charities. I am not concerned that the charities are not accomplishing the goals that they claim to be, or that their method for assessing these outcomes are significantly at fault. My concern is that charities fail to invest in assessing the long term collateral harm of these interventions which often do harm which overrides the good which is done by these charities. There are three metrics which are ignored by charity ranking organizations such as GiveWell, which from my experience on the ground are crucial to actually having a positive permanent effect on communities. The are job creation, community autonomy, and dependence. Organizations such as AMF consistently hurt all three sectors, and reverse any good that their interventions do. I have a video on the subject here. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmzTAJUspc8) but I'll summarize the points here.
Job creation. I can't put this point better than Dambisa Moyo herself: “There’s a mosquito net maker in Africa. He manufactures around 500 nets a week. He employs ten people, who (as with many African countries) each have to support upwards of fifteen relatives. However hard they work, they can’t make enough nets to combat the malaria-carrying mosquito. Enter vociferous Hollywood movie star who rallies the masses and goads Western governments to collect and send 100,000 mosquito nets to the affected region, at the cost of a million dollars. The nets arrive, the nets are distributed, and a ‘good’ deed is done. With the market flooded with foreign nets, however, our mosquito net maker is put out of business. His ten workers can no longer support their 150 dependents (who are now forced to depend on handouts), and one mustn’t forget that in a maximum of five years the majority of the imported nets will be torn, damaged and of no further use.” When we fund charities that take jobs away from communities, we do more harm than good. The AMF does exactly that.
Freedom to Choose: Now, let's talk about autonomy, I'll enlist William Easterly for this one: “In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meet them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local communities. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. Planners never hear whether the plan got what it needed; Searchers find out if their customers are satisfied." Effective altruism promotes organizations that plan, not organizations that search, because they focus on projects which apply across communities regardless of need. They do not build projects from the bottom up, they drop things from the top down. This harms developing democracies, and it does not allow for communities to decide what they need. Yes, systematically bottom up work is harder to do, but the effects are worth it.
Dependence: Organizations such as Give Directly may give some amount of choice to communities, but they drastically increase dependence on foreign aid. Here's my thought experiment: "Imagine that you are a parent and your daughter is getting bad grades at school. You hire a tutor and tell him you want him to ensure that your daughter gets better grades. The tutor asks if you would rather get her better grades through a data tested, efficient method with minimal cost required per grade, or a less efficient, more expensive method that might not get results and makes it harder to measure success. You pick the first, and immediately her grades improve. After a few months you ask the tutor what they have been doing. He explains that he was simply doing all the work for your child. Your goal was to improve your daughter’s grades, the most cost effective way to do that was to just do the work for her." This is exactly what many organizations, such as Give Directly do. They simply do the work for a community, instead of building capacity and increasing autonomy and dependence. This is great for the organization, since it ensures that the community will need aid forever, by destroying the infrastructure that the community previously used to make a living. If you get rid of the need for structures which produce food, or organizations which provide jobs, they will go out of business, so that when the community will be unable to return to them when the aid money eventually dries up.
Therefore I beseech you, include these criteria when assessing charities. Ask that charities produce everything with factories in local communities. Require that interventions be systematically bottom up. Make sure that charities are working themselves out of a job, instead of deepening the need for charity by creating dependence. It is an atrocity that so many people believe that they are doing god by donating to charities like AMF, when the people in these communities see that they are doing so much harm, and do not value the benefits that much. Malaria is treated like the flu here, and worldwide, they kill about the same number of people. People here don't want these interventions, they want jobs. The international community ignores this need, and instead takes away the few job opportunities available to these communities.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. There's a difference between demand and need. Need is the number of people that could use nets but do not. Demand is the number of people that actually want nets. The problem is that the need for nets is significantly higher than the demand. Oversupply decreases the demand for nets, no one will pay for something that is being given out for free. If you want people to actually use a net, you need to create demand, not just fill a need. Most people here literally put up their nets when they see the people that are coming to survey a village on the road. They lie about whether they sleep under a net, and spend most of peak mosquito biting time outside talking, not sleeping, so nets are left ineffective. Imagine that instead of buying many nets and shipping them in, AMF invested in local companies that produce nets to employ more people, expand their business, while simultaneously going to communities and sensitizing them about the importance of bednet use. This would increase demand as well as fill need. And, importantly it would be sustainable, AMF would eventually work themselves out of a job instead of killing off all of the local competition, and making the society completely dependent on their bed nets.
If I understand your point, you are claiming that, since bed net distributions are targeted to the poorest, the factories, which cater to the richer populations, would not have a problem. I have three concerns with this claim. First it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the sheer level of corruption that perpetrates many of these societies. In order to get resources to the poorest, (at least where I live, which is admittedly pretty high on the corruption index) you must give them to the wealthy who control the distribution centers, the ports, and the laws, and simply to be culturally appropriate and respectful. Second, this still does not address the problem that there is not actually a demand for these nets in the poorest communities, they don't want it, so of course they are going to sell it at a cheaper price than the factory can produce to the people that actually want it. Third, organizations which come into these countries rarely are able to distinguish the extreme poor from the moderately well off. Most people will pretend to be poor here in order to get handouts. I have seen families hide their television in the hopes of getting an organization to donate to them. Organizations frequently fail to actually give to the people that need it the most.
As for searchers and planners, the problem is, once again the difference between need and demand. AMF goes into areas that need nets, they don't go into areas that want nets. They go into areas that want jobs, electricity, or clean water. They don't sit down with the community and say, what do you need the most? A new market? Okay we will get that for you. They sit down with a community and say, you need bed nets, we are going to give you bed nets. If you say that you don't need them, we will go to the next village and give them bed nets instead. I have seen it. They do assessments of how many people get malaria in an area, not what people want if given the choice. The only comparable thing for someone that has not lived here is the flu. Have you gotten a flu shot every single year? Why not? People die of the flu at about the same rate as they die of malaria every year. Maybe because you think that other things are more important. These communities do too. Governments and organizations may request funding and nets, but I have spoken to many communities up and down this country, and never have they said that the thing that they need is bed nets, or malaria reduction. This is top down because AMF is not talking to the actual recipients of the aid, they are talking to intermediary organizations or governments, who ignore the needs of the people, just as much as AMF.
As for Give Directly, here's what I'm talking about. Imagine that you are a village tailor. You don't make enough as a tailor to support your three wives and 20 children (no that's not an exaggeration) so you are also a subsistence farmer. Give Directly comes in and provides you with money. You use these funds to supply your immediate needs. Give Directy proudly claims "This year we plan to provide entire communities of people with a basic income: regular cash payments that are enough for them to live on, for more than 10 years." Imagine you are one of the recipients, for ten years you get payments, so you have no need to work in your field or sew clothes. Your equipment breaks, villagers go to other tailors and you loose market share. Other people that need it more use your farms, and you let them, because culturally, those that have more must give to those that have less. Now ten years later, you were able to "eat your money" as they say, but now you have no business, no farm, and no more free income. You are worse off than you were before.
The video goes into these individual points in greater depth. What I fail to see is why effective altruists should not focus on programs that build capacity, provide jobs, actually listen to what the people want, not what international organizations determine that they need, and increase independence, instead of making recipients more and more dependent on foreign aid. I would be surprised if others who have actually lived in these communities for any substantial amount of time would disagree. The problem is that those that evaluate these charities are so far removed from the actual needs of the people, and the consequences of their actions, that they don't realize the harm that they do.
"for ten years you get payments, so you have no need to work in your field or sew clothes"
I don't believe that these cash payments, the equivalent of less than $1 a day, are sufficient to cause people to stop working. And the evidence is fairly clear from GiveDirectly's research that they do not have that effect. In fact by allowing people to invest in their education/health/business where previously they were credit constrained, they could fairly easily raise their work effort and productivity.