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.
I am against it when unemployment is so staggering in a country that young people leave en mass because they have no future. I am against it when there is literally no industry in a country and a single factory could make a world of difference. I am against it when the people in the country do not have a choice in the matter, when they cannot say, oh I would rather buy a bed net to support my local business here than to buy one from a foreign company, and instead they are forced to take bed nets for free, destroying any possibility of fair competition.
As for the claim that if we could get free things from abroad, it would be great, have you ever lived somewhere were you get everything for free from aboard? I do. Over 95% of my country's budget is straight aid. Everything is subsidized or donated. And it is horrible, no one has a job, (if you get free clothes, anyone that works at a clothing store is out of work, if you get free food anyone that works on a farm, or at a restaurant is out of work) so there is no capital lying around for you to do something with. We can't produce anything here, because no one wants to invest in a developing country, they would rather help by donating their money to keep these harmful charities alive.
If AMF spent a little more money and helped to create factories in the countries that they worked, they would actually help the local economies, prevent brain drain, and allow people to help themselves, the problem is that then, everyone at AMF and the foreign factory would be out of a job, since the people in the country could handle it themselves. It is better for them to perpetuate the problem and increase dependence since that will keep them in business. Spending a little more could make a world of difference. And this is exactly the problem with only assessing charities on certain factors while ignoring others.
How can locals get something from abroad? Most retail companies do not ship here, and even if they did it would be drastically out of anyone's price range. But not if they were made locally.
As for no one requesting bed nets, imagine that you go door to door in a town that makes matchsticks giving out free matchsticks for life. Imagine also that this town is sufficiently poor that if they can get something for free they don't have a choice. If you asked them, they would say they needed more jobs, but you did not ask them what they wanted. You give out matchsticks and eventually the factory, the only source of income for many families here, shuts down. You did harm. People here can't afford to refuse something that is given for free, and it hurts them in the long run. Why would it be so hard to use your money to give the community what they actually wanted? What gives you the right from afar to decide what a place you have never seen or visited needs? Why do you think that you know more about their lives than they do? Every day I see the harm that these organizations do, but since the recipients have no voice in these forums, the donors keep on doing their worst and patting themselves on the back for it.