Announcing the African EA Forum Competition - $4500 in prizes for excellent EA Forum Posts
The competition is now concluded. See the announcement of winners here.
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The Effective Altruism Forum serves as the main platform for thought leadership and experience sharing within the effective altruism movement. It is the virtual gathering spot for EAs and the space where most EAs will go to check for resources, materials and experiences for various areas of interest.
However, there are low levels of authorship by EAs from Africa, which gives the impression that not much is happening in the African space with regards to EA—despite there being 10+ local EA groups in Africa.
There is a need for increased thought leadership, experience sharing, and engagement from an African perspective that reflects the growth of EA in Africa and brings African perspectives to the wider EA community.
To get more Africans writing on the forum, I’m excited to announce the African EA Forum Competition.
How it works
Prizes will be awarded for winners and runners up in each of three categories:
Cause exploration: Explorations of new cause areas or contribution to thinking on existing cause areas
African perspectives on EA: Posts that challenge or complement existing EA perspectives and/or cause areas from an African worldview
Summaries of existing work: Informing the EA community about ongoing/completed research projects, sharing experiences within community groups, or reflections on being in EA
Top prize in each category will be awarded $1,000. Runner up in each category will get $500.
No need to include the category in your submission.
Judging
Posts will be judged based on the following rubric:
Originality of insight
Clarity
Discussion provoked: (judged by the post’s forum score and number of comments)
Persuasiveness of argument
This is replaced by Relevance to forum readers for summaries of existing work
The members of our judging panel are:
Alimi Salifou—head of the Effective Altruism University of Lagos and Regional Lead of the Young World Federalists—West Africa
Jordan Pieters—independent community builder
Kaleem Ahmid—Project Manager at Effective Ventures
Dr. Kikiope Oluwarore—co-founder of Healthier Hens
Zainab Taonga Chirwa—Chairperson for Effective Altruism UCT
Support offered to writers
We will support writers in the following two ways:
Virtual training on EA Forum writing: there will be a ~1-2 hour workshop to build the capacity of individuals interested in writing forum posts
Offering mentorship: curating a list of individuals who are happy to offer feedback to new writers to bolster the confidence of those writing about their posts, especially those who may feel intimidated by the seemingly high bar of forum posts
Writers do not have to attend the forum or receive mentorship to be eligible for the competition. They only have to make a forum post within the competition period, and meet the eligibility criteria below.
Please fill out this form if you would like to join the workshop or receive mentorship.
Who is eligible
Anybody who is:
a citizen of an African country
a children of a citizen of an Africa country
Posts should be made to the EA forum with the tag ‘Africa EA Forum Competition’ to make them easy to find, and then the writer should identify themself by filling out this form.
Posts with multiple authors are eligible as long as 50% or more of the authors meet the above criteria.
Timeline
The competition will run for 3 months. Any post made between 14 May 2023 − 11:59pm on Friday 18 August 2023 is eligible.
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Please reach out to me with any questions or feedback on how this competition could be better! (ljeure@gmail.com)
Thanks to Daniel Yu for funding the prizes, Waithera Mwangi for support in writing this post, and to our judges for offering their time
Awesome initiative, excited to read some of the entries. I hope this can be a springboard for higher levels of involvement and activate individuals and writers or writers to be in Africa.
Also, I think what could also go far in getting more African and other less represented individuals (in EA) to participate and engage more in the international EA space would be a funding pool/assistance specifically for getting individuals to conferences, there can often be issues with visas and funding.
I strongly agree.
Funding seems quite tractable—there could be a fund specifically for assisting EAs from Africa to go to conferences.
On the visa assistance thing I’m not sure what would be very tractable—maybe there is some way these conferences could position themselves that would make it easier for Africans to get “education”-related visas rather than tourist visas (e.g., if EAG positioned itself as an academic conference somehow, would that enable people to apply under more lenient visa categories)?
This is insightful.. and would really go a long way in enhancing the participation of Africans and other less represented regions in EA activities if well implemented.
Very insightful
Wonderful initiative!