Thanks for this initiative! My somewhat thought through take from someone who knows a bunch of people who lost their jobs and who’s work has been mildly but meaningfully affected by USAID cuts is that I would be slow to throw money at projects previously funded by USAID.
Most USAID projects just won’t be the most cost effective place to put your dollar, even if cost effectiveness might be slightly increases by providing a bridge to get them restarted. As much as cutting the aid abruptly is doing large amounts of harm and feels terrible, if the original project is only moderately cost effective it might still not make sense.
Most orgs and projects are often surprisingly resilient to pauses, especially in sub Saharan Africa. There are very few cases where the work wouldn’t be able to restart in a few months if funding was returned from somewhere else. This points to me against the “bridging” argument drastically increasing cost effectiveness above what it would have been for the project anyway.
f you do choose to get involved, talk to a lot of people before deciding. Other funders are thinking the same thing about whether to get involved in similar initiatives, and they might have done a bunch of research on it too. For example I know GiveWell are thinking about this too.
I don’t love that the site doesn’t have actual links to the work that’s being funded. For example one case seemed super dubious to me “East Africa, one entity cannot make a $100,000 purchase of life-saving HIV/AIDS medications and another cannot purchase $50,000 worth of nutrient-dense foods for children, both because of the freeze on U.S. foreign aid.”
To the best of my knowledge. East African countries still have enough HIV meds for a few months at least, and I don’t know much about of parallel programs that would purchase medication separately like this. I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong but I’d like to hear more.
Thanks for your thoughts Nick, helpful. I think being skeptical of rushing to fund everything that USAID was funding is the right instinct, and it sound like you have a strong prior regarding the resilience of some projects—at least in SSA. Would you generalize broadly, across cause area and geography? It seems to me that significant reductions in the stability of American foreign aid, and the infrastructure that it provides, will hobble some efforts. The key, therefore, is to do some quick work—hopefully public facing—that identifies those causes and areas that are most likely to suffer from uncertainty in the short term.
Thanks Tom! No I wouldn’t generalise that broadly, I’m sure there will be some cases where it might be cost effective to get some bridging funding in there. For me it’s less about the nature of the program, and more about whether there’s are tipping points in the vulnerability of the people being cared for.
If we take top GiveWell charities as an example, in situations like mosquito nets, vitamin A, distribution, deworming if those stopped for a year they could probably be started again fairly easily in a year without disproportionate harm. The lives lost would mostly be just because there were less nets delivered (the same as is they had less funding in the first place), not because of some disastrous vulnerability exposed.
A counterexample which might have merit to fund might be something like a malnutrition program where you are halfway through giving rutf to 100,000 kids. Maybe you have enough RUTF to feed the kids but USAID has cut funding for staff. Lots of benefit from the first half of the program would be lost of you didn’t fund staff for the second half. Maybe this would be worth paying the staff to finish the program—assuming it’s a relatively good malnutrition program without hugely bloated salaries as USAID projects often have. In saying this you could probably offer the staff half their USAID pay to come back and finish the program and nearly all would—even more cost effective (this might sound callous but I have discussed it here before)
Or something like a highly effective gender based violence program that was halfway through—you might have very little benefit for people if the program remained unfinished, so finishing it might really be worth it.
I’m not saying most projects are “resilient” as such—without funding they will stop. Just that most could be restarted again relatively easily in future without huge extra expense.
The problem is you can’t trust NGOs to tell you the truth on this—almost all are hardwired to use disasters in any way they can to raise more money. You’d have to investigate the real situation on the ground pretty hard. I was horrified during covid how many NGOs unrelated to health managed to make spurious arguments why they needed way more money.
By the way if anyone is considering funding stuff on a big scale in East Africa, in happy to get on a call and give you my 10 cents (“my 2 cents is free”)
Thanks for this initiative! My somewhat thought through take from someone who knows a bunch of people who lost their jobs and who’s work has been mildly but meaningfully affected by USAID cuts is that I would be slow to throw money at projects previously funded by USAID.
Most USAID projects just won’t be the most cost effective place to put your dollar, even if cost effectiveness might be slightly increases by providing a bridge to get them restarted. As much as cutting the aid abruptly is doing large amounts of harm and feels terrible, if the original project is only moderately cost effective it might still not make sense.
Most orgs and projects are often surprisingly resilient to pauses, especially in sub Saharan Africa. There are very few cases where the work wouldn’t be able to restart in a few months if funding was returned from somewhere else. This points to me against the “bridging” argument drastically increasing cost effectiveness above what it would have been for the project anyway.
f you do choose to get involved, talk to a lot of people before deciding. Other funders are thinking the same thing about whether to get involved in similar initiatives, and they might have done a bunch of research on it too. For example I know GiveWell are thinking about this too.
I don’t love that the site doesn’t have actual links to the work that’s being funded. For example one case seemed super dubious to me “East Africa, one entity cannot make a $100,000 purchase of life-saving HIV/AIDS medications and another cannot purchase $50,000 worth of nutrient-dense foods for children, both because of the freeze on U.S. foreign aid.”
To the best of my knowledge. East African countries still have enough HIV meds for a few months at least, and I don’t know much about of parallel programs that would purchase medication separately like this. I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong but I’d like to hear more.
Thanks for your thoughts Nick, helpful. I think being skeptical of rushing to fund everything that USAID was funding is the right instinct, and it sound like you have a strong prior regarding the resilience of some projects—at least in SSA. Would you generalize broadly, across cause area and geography? It seems to me that significant reductions in the stability of American foreign aid, and the infrastructure that it provides, will hobble some efforts. The key, therefore, is to do some quick work—hopefully public facing—that identifies those causes and areas that are most likely to suffer from uncertainty in the short term.
Thanks Tom! No I wouldn’t generalise that broadly, I’m sure there will be some cases where it might be cost effective to get some bridging funding in there. For me it’s less about the nature of the program, and more about whether there’s are tipping points in the vulnerability of the people being cared for.
If we take top GiveWell charities as an example, in situations like mosquito nets, vitamin A, distribution, deworming if those stopped for a year they could probably be started again fairly easily in a year without disproportionate harm. The lives lost would mostly be just because there were less nets delivered (the same as is they had less funding in the first place), not because of some disastrous vulnerability exposed.
A counterexample which might have merit to fund might be something like a malnutrition program where you are halfway through giving rutf to 100,000 kids. Maybe you have enough RUTF to feed the kids but USAID has cut funding for staff. Lots of benefit from the first half of the program would be lost of you didn’t fund staff for the second half. Maybe this would be worth paying the staff to finish the program—assuming it’s a relatively good malnutrition program without hugely bloated salaries as USAID projects often have. In saying this you could probably offer the staff half their USAID pay to come back and finish the program and nearly all would—even more cost effective (this might sound callous but I have discussed it here before)
Or something like a highly effective gender based violence program that was halfway through—you might have very little benefit for people if the program remained unfinished, so finishing it might really be worth it.
I’m not saying most projects are “resilient” as such—without funding they will stop. Just that most could be restarted again relatively easily in future without huge extra expense.
The problem is you can’t trust NGOs to tell you the truth on this—almost all are hardwired to use disasters in any way they can to raise more money. You’d have to investigate the real situation on the ground pretty hard. I was horrified during covid how many NGOs unrelated to health managed to make spurious arguments why they needed way more money.
By the way if anyone is considering funding stuff on a big scale in East Africa, in happy to get on a call and give you my 10 cents (“my 2 cents is free”)