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.
Just because an argument is generic, does not make it incorrect. And, to be clear, they are not arguments against all types of developing world charity, simply those which ignore the impact that they have on communities by increasing dependence, destroying jobs, and limiting freedom.
As for local mosquito net factories, if you lost your job just because some foreign NGO wanted to eliminate the flu (which kills about as many people as malaria every year), and you got absolutely no say in it, you might be singing a different tune. Why should a foreigner, get to decide that flu shots are more important than putting people to work? Why should you, a foreigner, get to decide that trying to eliminate a problem that most people here see as no more harmful than the flu, is more important than a local business and people's jobs? You don't know these people, what gives you the right to steal their jobs because you know better than they do?
Furthermore, on the first point, the problem is that when organizations are donating everything to these communities, food, medicine, nets, clothing, etc. they have no opportunities to grow their own industries. What is so wrong about asking the AMF to get nets that are made in the country that they will help? Why must we get nets shipped in and employ foreigners, at the expense of jobs in developing countries? Because if we actually built up an industry in the country, everyone at AMF would be out of a job. So long as they keep the country dependent on their mosquito nets, they will stay in business.
As for the second claim, here's some further context: for searchers and planners, the problem is, the difference between need (what some outside group decides people are in need of) and demand (what people actually want). 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. To understand, think back to the comparison to the flu. Have you gotten a flu shot every single year? Why not? 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.
Finally, here's a quote from Give Directly "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." They do not just give one time cash payments.
If you want to understand where I am coming from more, I would suggest spending time living in one of these communities served by these organizations. Maybe you will have a different experience to mine. But where I am, these organizations do more harm than good.
Are you against buying goods from other countries when it's cheaper to get them from there, rather than manufacturing them domestically?
If you aren't, you also shouldn't be against a country receiving free bed nets. Receiving free goods from another country is just an extreme instance of goods being cheaper to buy from overseas (in this case for $0), which benefits the recipient country.
If we could get free clothes, free cars, free food, and so on from overseas, that would be awesome. People and capital are freed up to produce other good/services domestic... (read more)