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.
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful response. Here are my thoughts:
A may seem better from an international perspective, but if you ask the people here if they would rather have a factory and more jobs, something they could be proud of, a reason for young people to not leave the country in droves, and the feeling that they are able to solve their own problems, or more bed nets, they would pick A every time. I have asked many communities across the country in Community Analysis surveys what they need, they often say electricity, clean water, better roads, and consistently the most popular answer is more jobs. But I have never seen a community ask for bed nets, or a cure for malaria. To them, it is like the flu. The point is that, just because it seems better to you, it does not mean that it is what people want, and who are you to tell people in countries that you have never visited what they need? I agree that it would be more work to subsidize a factory, but the benefits to the morale of the people, (something which is hard to quantify beyond the percent of people that die trying to illegally immigrate to Europe) would drastically outweigh the costs, and you would be listening to what the people actually want instead of deciding for them.
But why do governments in richer countries implement these kinds of programs? Surely it is because the people in that country are more educated, and vote in leaders, or vote for initiatives which inevitably improve their health. Programs like AMF which cut the voter out of the loop do significant damage to democracies. When politicians are beholden to foreign companies and governments for aid instead of their people for votes, they will serve the interests of the foreign organizations, not the people. If the appeal is made to the government, not the people, then he people fail to see the importance of the intervention, and it is not sustainable. We should be educating people so that they ask their government to implement these changes, not cutting the people out of the equation for the sake of saving costs, and thereby cutting young democracies off at the knees. I would be surprised if bed net distributions would actively decrease use of nets, but I have seen many communities actively attempt to deceive researchers about their use of bed nets because they know what "the right answer" is and they know what they need to say to get the foreigners to give them more things. So while I doubt that use decreased, I'm skeptical that it increased at the rates touted by these organizations. My question is, why could we not instead do campaigns solely focused on increasing demand, so that people would actually ask their governments for these interventions. This might lead to people holding their officials (who are actually, at least in principle answerable to the people) responsible for health interventions, as opposed to foreign organizations who are answerable to their donors.
I do not live somewhere where Give Directly works, but there are similar programs where I live. Though the study was interesting, my central concern is that, at least here, lying to strangers is not merely culturally acceptable, it is expected, especially when those strangers are foreigners. Therefore any answers given by families on the baseline or endline surveys are certainly in question (especially since people here simply tell you what they think you want to hear). To give you a sense, we have local staff here who conduct surveys in villages, and it is difficult for them to even accurately find out the primary language of the village, without spending several weeks there since everyone just speaks to you in the language you start speaking to them in until they trust you more. Simply, if the people there are anything like the people here, I would be surprised if they took sufficient precautions to rule out desirability bias. The point about labor supply is interesting, but the study does note that it was unable to study true long term effects of these interventions. Give Directly is promoting providing villages money for ten years, from my understanding, the study did not analyze the effects of such actions over long periods of time anything more than four months "this variation in the present study is not sufficient to obtain reliable estimates for the evolution of the treatment effect over time" those are the interventions that I am concerned with, and those are the ones which could do more harm.
In your concluding sentence you make three points that I would like to address. First you claim that the studies are well done, second you claim that they should be trusted over anecdotal evidence, and third you claim that this may vary from place to place.
4) To the first point, simply because a study is well done, it does not make it true. You can do everything in your power to stop someone from lying to you, or telling you just what they think you want them to hear, but, at least where I am unless you live for weeks with a community, they will lie to you. I have seen so many researchers get survey answers from families that I am aware are false, simply because that is the culture here. Just because something is well done, it does not mean that it is true.
5) Yes, the information that I present is anecdotal, but in a culture where it is expected that you lie to strangers, that is all that we have. The problem is that so few donors actually come and experience the reality of what the organizations they support are doing, and even when they do, it is often for such a short time, or they are sufficiently insulted from the community that they fail to experience the catastrophic failures of the programs they are supporting (especially since they are often there seeing only what the program wants them to see). Due to the culture of lying to strangers here, I would trust an anecdote form someone that knows a community well over a well thought out study any day. Maybe that is just because I have seen so many studies here get things so wrong. How long were you here? Where? What kind of research did you do?
6) I would like to end in agreement, so to your last point, I think you are correct. My experience is limited to where I live, and West Africa is certainly different from East Africa in many ways. Problems that we face here, may not be significant concerns over there. I share these concerns and experiences because it seems to me that the majority of the people in this forum have spent little time in the actual communities that receive donations from these organizations. Those communities are unable to speak for themselves (usually no internet), so I am simply trying to give them a voice and explain why they would disagree so drastically with many of the proposed interventions. Thanks for sharing these articles and views. I have committed my life to doing the most good in the world, and from my experience organizations promoted by Give Well are not the best way. All the best!
Hi carneades, in reply I just want to make 2 general points here:
Many things need to be done in the developing world, e.g.the ones you mentioned: protecting people against malaria, creating jobs, improving the quality of governments... The most effective intervention for one purpose could be not very useful for another, but that's still okay because it would be better than trying to do something that serves multiple purposes but is ineffective in all of them. (e.g. for protecting people against malaria, the most effective intervention could be distributi