Let’s talk about two ways of granting money to small, hard-to-evaluate projects to help people in extreme poverty.
One is the method Kalulu is calling for, which is donating to small, local, grassroots charities like his Uganda Community Farm. UCF has existed since 2013. They grow crops at their farm, then train other farmers to do the same, give them material inputs, and build a pipeline to market for their collective output.
They have 4-7 people on their team, have a tiny budget (“$0 for the most part”), and work with 300-400 farmers, of whom about 50 have made a switch in what they plant. After stopping their sorghum operations during 2020-2021 due to COVID-19, they are back. They also have a vision of building an agro-processing plant, which they estimate would cost $1 million for farmer support and cassava, cereal and grain processing, and a further $14 million for an additional component for processing fruit.
The other is donating directly to individuals living in extreme poverty, to spend the money as they see fit. This is what GiveDirectly, founded in 2008, does.
On their website, requests come with the potential recipient’s own story about why they are requesting a grant. Isaiah, 26, of Pleebo, Liberia, says “Since I dropped out of school in 2019 when I was in the eleventh grade, I am happy that GiveDirectly has given me the hope of restarting my education… One of the main things that I am thinking of right now is to invest in a mini business wherein I will be buying goods from Pleebo and taking them to my community to be sold. The proceeds from my business will provide funds to forward my education.”
One rebuttal to Kalulu’s argument about the superior persistence of local, grassroots organizations is that UCF did have to stop its operations for about two years due to COVID-19. Certainly, that’s not UCF’s fault, and I feel sympathy for their hardship. I also admire Kalulu’s work to lift himself and his neighboring farmers out of extreme poverty.
But by contrast, GiveDirectly not only maintained its operations during COVID-19, but created a new program for COVID-19 support that distributed $76 million to 342,000 African families. They can do this because they can wire money directly to recipients. GiveDirectly is also experimenting with 2-year and 12-year basic incomes for 40 villages.
Kalulu’s article is hard to interpret because he doesn’t name the “one [well-funded] international charity which is among those described by the EA movement as being ‘effective’.” He says they’re also working with local farmers on maize, which he thinks is a bad choice relative to sugarcane and other cash crops. I don’t know what charity he’s referring to, but perhaps they should hire Kalulu for some kind of local consulting role?
But I don’t think his descriptions of EA charities are accurate. GiveDirectly is giving people money to do with as they choose, and is experimenting with long-term commitments to UBI. Their operations are continuous. That does not strike me as the transient, passive charity Kalulu’s critiquing. AMF has existed since 2004, GiveDirectly since 2008, and both have maintained continuous operations since then. It’s not at all a fair comparison, but UCF is 5-9 years younger as an organization, and has faced ~two years of stoppped or slowed operations due to COVID-19. I’m sure their situation would have been different, had they been better funded, but I think it’s important to respond to the specific arguments Kalulu is making in his article.
Overall, I would not support donating to local, little-vetted grassroots charities with a modest track record of success to the tune of millions of dollars. I would be open to an experiment with donating to local grassroots charities in smaller amounts. For example, each of the ~6,000 recipients of GiveDirectly’s long-term basic income experiment will receive a total of $3285 over the lifetime of the experiment. Donating about $3,000 to a set of 6,000 randomly-selected local grassroots charities in impoverished regions (perhaps focusing on ones that have already existed for at least 3-5 years) seems like a reasonable way to experiment with spending $18 million.
The only EA aligned charity I can find doing anyrhing in Africa with maize is the food fortification initiative, although they don’t really fit Anthony’s description, so he may be referring to a different EA aligned charity
That would make sense, they’re on The Live You Can Save’s list of charities. I note on the article for One Acre Fund that “In 2018, 78% of One Acre’s higher-skilled Africa-based roles were filled by African nationals — including the CEO. By the end of 2020, One Acre Fund will recruit, manage, and deliver professional development services to over 10,000 African national employees.” That doesn’t necessarily make it grassroots and local on the same level of granularity or comprehensiveness of UCF, but it’s also a much bigger organization serving a much wider area.
One Acre Fund also works with a huge variety of crops in different countries. They don’t seem to bring some Western doctrinaire attachment to maize. I wouldn’t be surprised if they could do better with another crop but that seems like a technical question more than anything.
Let’s talk about two ways of granting money to small, hard-to-evaluate projects to help people in extreme poverty.
One is the method Kalulu is calling for, which is donating to small, local, grassroots charities like his Uganda Community Farm. UCF has existed since 2013. They grow crops at their farm, then train other farmers to do the same, give them material inputs, and build a pipeline to market for their collective output.
They have 4-7 people on their team, have a tiny budget (“$0 for the most part”), and work with 300-400 farmers, of whom about 50 have made a switch in what they plant. After stopping their sorghum operations during 2020-2021 due to COVID-19, they are back. They also have a vision of building an agro-processing plant, which they estimate would cost $1 million for farmer support and cassava, cereal and grain processing, and a further $14 million for an additional component for processing fruit.
The other is donating directly to individuals living in extreme poverty, to spend the money as they see fit. This is what GiveDirectly, founded in 2008, does.
On their website, requests come with the potential recipient’s own story about why they are requesting a grant. Isaiah, 26, of Pleebo, Liberia, says “Since I dropped out of school in 2019 when I was in the eleventh grade, I am happy that GiveDirectly has given me the hope of restarting my education… One of the main things that I am thinking of right now is to invest in a mini business wherein I will be buying goods from Pleebo and taking them to my community to be sold. The proceeds from my business will provide funds to forward my education.”
One rebuttal to Kalulu’s argument about the superior persistence of local, grassroots organizations is that UCF did have to stop its operations for about two years due to COVID-19. Certainly, that’s not UCF’s fault, and I feel sympathy for their hardship. I also admire Kalulu’s work to lift himself and his neighboring farmers out of extreme poverty.
But by contrast, GiveDirectly not only maintained its operations during COVID-19, but created a new program for COVID-19 support that distributed $76 million to 342,000 African families. They can do this because they can wire money directly to recipients. GiveDirectly is also experimenting with 2-year and 12-year basic incomes for 40 villages.
Kalulu’s article is hard to interpret because he doesn’t name the “one [well-funded] international charity which is among those described by the EA movement as being ‘effective’.” He says they’re also working with local farmers on maize, which he thinks is a bad choice relative to sugarcane and other cash crops. I don’t know what charity he’s referring to, but perhaps they should hire Kalulu for some kind of local consulting role?
But I don’t think his descriptions of EA charities are accurate. GiveDirectly is giving people money to do with as they choose, and is experimenting with long-term commitments to UBI. Their operations are continuous. That does not strike me as the transient, passive charity Kalulu’s critiquing. AMF has existed since 2004, GiveDirectly since 2008, and both have maintained continuous operations since then. It’s not at all a fair comparison, but UCF is 5-9 years younger as an organization, and has faced ~two years of stoppped or slowed operations due to COVID-19. I’m sure their situation would have been different, had they been better funded, but I think it’s important to respond to the specific arguments Kalulu is making in his article.
Overall, I would not support donating to local, little-vetted grassroots charities with a modest track record of success to the tune of millions of dollars. I would be open to an experiment with donating to local grassroots charities in smaller amounts. For example, each of the ~6,000 recipients of GiveDirectly’s long-term basic income experiment will receive a total of $3285 over the lifetime of the experiment. Donating about $3,000 to a set of 6,000 randomly-selected local grassroots charities in impoverished regions (perhaps focusing on ones that have already existed for at least 3-5 years) seems like a reasonable way to experiment with spending $18 million.
The only EA aligned charity I can find doing anyrhing in Africa with maize is the food fortification initiative, although they don’t really fit Anthony’s description, so he may be referring to a different EA aligned charity
Not sure, but I would bet Anthony is referring to One Acre Fund.
That would make sense, they’re on The Live You Can Save’s list of charities. I note on the article for One Acre Fund that “In 2018, 78% of One Acre’s higher-skilled Africa-based roles were filled by African nationals — including the CEO. By the end of 2020, One Acre Fund will recruit, manage, and deliver professional development services to over 10,000 African national employees.” That doesn’t necessarily make it grassroots and local on the same level of granularity or comprehensiveness of UCF, but it’s also a much bigger organization serving a much wider area.
One Acre Fund also works with a huge variety of crops in different countries. They don’t seem to bring some Western doctrinaire attachment to maize. I wouldn’t be surprised if they could do better with another crop but that seems like a technical question more than anything.