(Writing in cluelessness from the USA) I accept the argument for importance, and notice myself defaulting to considering the problem intractable because I don’t know how tractable it is to meaningfully improve school safety in Uganda. Will you please share more about how hard it might be, and what it would take, to make this better?
Thanks Cienna! I’m sure you are far from clueless :)
Like with any large scale policy issue, tractability is a big issue—but in this kind of case I have a couple of vaguely similar examples which show that it could well be tractable. I’m an enormous fan of advocacy and actvism as one of the most cost effective ways to solve specific, clear problems, perhaps even a bigger fan than most effective altruists as I’ve seen my wife succeed spectacularly a couple of times at least.
My wife worked on something 5 years ago which has some similarity in that it was a policy that was changed, having a big positve effect. Her and a community group from scratch managed to get a local district level law passed to effectively ban alcohol “sachets”, tiny 50ml plastic bags of heavy spirits of varying qualities. 2 years later later this was followed up with a nation al ban. This was based on both strong community will to ban the sachets as they could see the enormous harm caused by them, and a large amount of research that shows if you increase the quantity of the minimum size unit of alcohol (e.g. from 50 to 150ml like what happened here) , you hugely lower the damage done by alcohol.
What it would take (for example the high school sleep issue) specifically is advocacy to the ministry of education to pass a local (district wide) or national ordinance decreeing minimum sleep in a high school, then ensuring enforcement (harder than getting the law passed). The physical abuse of primary school children would be much harder as it is culturally ingrained—it’s such a well known and horrible issue there are in fact a number of BINGOS (big international NGOs like world vision etc.) doing a terrible job already trying to fix that problem mainly through education (posters, trainings, etc.). High level advocacy would be far better.
The thing is you could throw $30,000 or something at a specific problem such as the borderline torture of sleep deprivation in high school kids and probably have something like a 1 in 10 chance of success(with astronomical uncertainly and probably better odds if it’s someone like my wife working on it!) . I’m not going to do the math but it might well be a relatively cost-effective campaign.
I don’t see how “decreeing minimum sleep” would work. Why aren’t the high school students getting enough sleep? Are they also working jobs? Do they live far away from the schools?
Sorry I forget there’s a bunch of context I forget to lay out
Maybe 80% of high schools here are boarding schools, that’s what I’m talking about.
So most of these these boarding schools force the students to get up at 4:00am-5:00am to prepare ,and work until 10pm in the evening. It sounds crazy but the schools honestly think this torrid regime will get better results for their students. Of course students end up trying to steal extra sleep wherever they can, just to get by.
With 2 students we were helping with high school where I think this contributed to serious mental health problems at the school, and one ended up leaving school.
Thanks! Now it makes sense how a decree would help. I imagine some additional culture shift would be needed to make sure that the kids weren’t still under a lot of pressure, just less overt.
(Writing in cluelessness from the USA) I accept the argument for importance, and notice myself defaulting to considering the problem intractable because I don’t know how tractable it is to meaningfully improve school safety in Uganda. Will you please share more about how hard it might be, and what it would take, to make this better?
Thanks Cienna! I’m sure you are far from clueless :)
Like with any large scale policy issue, tractability is a big issue—but in this kind of case I have a couple of vaguely similar examples which show that it could well be tractable. I’m an enormous fan of advocacy and actvism as one of the most cost effective ways to solve specific, clear problems, perhaps even a bigger fan than most effective altruists as I’ve seen my wife succeed spectacularly a couple of times at least.
My wife worked on something 5 years ago which has some similarity in that it was a policy that was changed, having a big positve effect. Her and a community group from scratch managed to get a local district level law passed to effectively ban alcohol “sachets”, tiny 50ml plastic bags of heavy spirits of varying qualities. 2 years later later this was followed up with a nation al ban. This was based on both strong community will to ban the sachets as they could see the enormous harm caused by them, and a large amount of research that shows if you increase the quantity of the minimum size unit of alcohol (e.g. from 50 to 150ml like what happened here) , you hugely lower the damage done by alcohol.
Also the banning of lead paint thing in Malawi has some similarities in that it’s a harmful policy being overturned through government advocacy, and that seems to be going pretty well.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ErKzbKWnQMwvzRX4m/seven-things-that-surprised-us-in-our-first-year-working-in
What it would take (for example the high school sleep issue) specifically is advocacy to the ministry of education to pass a local (district wide) or national ordinance decreeing minimum sleep in a high school, then ensuring enforcement (harder than getting the law passed). The physical abuse of primary school children would be much harder as it is culturally ingrained—it’s such a well known and horrible issue there are in fact a number of BINGOS (big international NGOs like world vision etc.) doing a terrible job already trying to fix that problem mainly through education (posters, trainings, etc.). High level advocacy would be far better.
The thing is you could throw $30,000 or something at a specific problem such as the borderline torture of sleep deprivation in high school kids and probably have something like a 1 in 10 chance of success(with astronomical uncertainly and probably better odds if it’s someone like my wife working on it!) . I’m not going to do the math but it might well be a relatively cost-effective campaign.
Wow I just wrote an essay oh dear...
Neat about the alcohol sachets!
I don’t see how “decreeing minimum sleep” would work. Why aren’t the high school students getting enough sleep? Are they also working jobs? Do they live far away from the schools?
Sorry I forget there’s a bunch of context I forget to lay out
Maybe 80% of high schools here are boarding schools, that’s what I’m talking about.
So most of these these boarding schools force the students to get up at 4:00am-5:00am to prepare ,and work until 10pm in the evening. It sounds crazy but the schools honestly think this torrid regime will get better results for their students. Of course students end up trying to steal extra sleep wherever they can, just to get by.
With 2 students we were helping with high school where I think this contributed to serious mental health problems at the school, and one ended up leaving school.
Thanks! Now it makes sense how a decree would help. I imagine some additional culture shift would be needed to make sure that the kids weren’t still under a lot of pressure, just less overt.