Thank you so, so much for this report. I’m stunned and encouraged that you managed to form a group of development people who gather around effective altruism ideas in Cameroon. I’m not the worst at enthusiastic pitching, but I’ve had close to zero interest while talking to development people here in Uganda. I found everything in this post ring deeply true with my experience.
This observation hit hard while making sense
”There was no correlation between experience and effect or grant size and effect, it is as if organizations don’t get more effective with experience and professionalism. If anything the correlation is negative. We think this is because organizations get more effective at capturing donor funding not at providing a better service.”
Imagine if there was a field of work, where experience and professionalism could sometimes make you less effective, because increasing money availability is associated with less effective interventions. Maybe more work needs to be done on this? I’ve seen that play out with a number of NGOs here, where they start off with one clear goal which is probably effective if not optimal. (like refugee mental health, recycling, post-war reconciliation) but then start just chasing the money, adding random less and less effective programs until they are doing everything and nothing.
I believe that Doing one thing wellshould be a fundamental norm in the NGO/aid world. But its not.
Similar to your observations, the trend/vibe for NGO interventions here seems to center around these three buckets at the moment, although the winds are often changing
Random assortments Gender based violence interventions—which is sad because there may well be interventions which could be effective in this area.
General holistic multi-pronged interventions. I laughed hard at “cultivating mushrooms” Here in Northern Uganda we also have mushroom projects but the real buzz right now is making honey—something everyone is doing anyway commercially so I’m not sure why so many NGOs are pouring money into it...
Climate climate climate, everything is connected to climate to access that funding.… Many completely useless agriculture interventions manage to tap this funding hard
And boy is it refreshing to see a fantastic GHD post on here haha. Super keen to link up with your group as well and share more experience—great work!
I’m generally with you on “doing one thing well”; but I also note that there are efficiencies in combining programs, which charities seem extremely reluctant to do on their own, even when the synergies are obvious. It’s plausible to me that merger is the best way to get these economies of scale. Or else some kind of outsourced service provider that could create synergies outside of the individual charities operations, similar to how most smaller e-tailers don’t deliver their own merchandise.
When I visited some GiveDirectly beneficiaries in Kenya, I was struck by the story of a guy who had gotten some horticultural training from PLAN more than a decade previous, but had been unable to put it to use since for lack of funds (until GiveDirectly came around). Yet I doubt that either GiveDirectly or PLAN would have the slightest interest in aligning their programs to get the increased impact that in this case happened by accident. I think about this anecdote a lot.
Yep I agree with this, in a minority of situations it might be plausible to merge orgs. I doubt mergers would usually achieve more efficiency, and would be interested to hear of an example, I would imagine it has worked well in some cases. The Givewell examples are combinations of interventions not merged organisations, and make a lot of sense.
One thing I’ve been dubious about along these lines is that some big orgs that seem to be moving into cost effective interventions they might not be expert at rolling out to access Givewell funding. For example One Acre fund, an org which has a great mission to maximize crop yield for substance farming, was funded by Givewell to test a chlorination program in Rwanda. I dont love this and my instinct would be I would rather a dedicated experienced chlorination org scaled up to take this on.
In saying that I was super impressed that OneAcre fund and GiveWell decided to stop this trial early because it didn’t seem to be working and one acre fund effectively returned some of the money. Kudos to this high integrity approach to effective aid, super rare to see.
Thank you so, so much for this report. I’m stunned and encouraged that you managed to form a group of development people who gather around effective altruism ideas in Cameroon. I’m not the worst at enthusiastic pitching, but I’ve had close to zero interest while talking to development people here in Uganda. I found everything in this post ring deeply true with my experience.
This observation hit hard while making sense
”There was no correlation between experience and effect or grant size and effect, it is as if organizations don’t get more effective with experience and professionalism. If anything the correlation is negative. We think this is because organizations get more effective at capturing donor funding not at providing a better service.”
Imagine if there was a field of work, where experience and professionalism could sometimes make you less effective, because increasing money availability is associated with less effective interventions. Maybe more work needs to be done on this? I’ve seen that play out with a number of NGOs here, where they start off with one clear goal which is probably effective if not optimal. (like refugee mental health, recycling, post-war reconciliation) but then start just chasing the money, adding random less and less effective programs until they are doing everything and nothing.
I believe that Doing one thing well should be a fundamental norm in the NGO/aid world. But its not.
Similar to your observations, the trend/vibe for NGO interventions here seems to center around these three buckets at the moment, although the winds are often changing
Random assortments Gender based violence interventions—which is sad because there may well be interventions which could be effective in this area.
General holistic multi-pronged interventions. I laughed hard at “cultivating mushrooms” Here in Northern Uganda we also have mushroom projects but the real buzz right now is making honey—something everyone is doing anyway commercially so I’m not sure why so many NGOs are pouring money into it...
Climate climate climate, everything is connected to climate to access that funding.… Many completely useless agriculture interventions manage to tap this funding hard
And boy is it refreshing to see a fantastic GHD post on here haha. Super keen to link up with your group as well and share more experience—great work!
I’m generally with you on “doing one thing well”; but I also note that there are efficiencies in combining programs, which charities seem extremely reluctant to do on their own, even when the synergies are obvious. It’s plausible to me that merger is the best way to get these economies of scale. Or else some kind of outsourced service provider that could create synergies outside of the individual charities operations, similar to how most smaller e-tailers don’t deliver their own merchandise.
When I visited some GiveDirectly beneficiaries in Kenya, I was struck by the story of a guy who had gotten some horticultural training from PLAN more than a decade previous, but had been unable to put it to use since for lack of funds (until GiveDirectly came around). Yet I doubt that either GiveDirectly or PLAN would have the slightest interest in aligning their programs to get the increased impact that in this case happened by accident. I think about this anecdote a lot.
Yep I agree with this, in a minority of situations it might be plausible to merge orgs. I doubt mergers would usually achieve more efficiency, and would be interested to hear of an example, I would imagine it has worked well in some cases. The Givewell examples are combinations of interventions not merged organisations, and make a lot of sense.
One thing I’ve been dubious about along these lines is that some big orgs that seem to be moving into cost effective interventions they might not be expert at rolling out to access Givewell funding. For example One Acre fund, an org which has a great mission to maximize crop yield for substance farming, was funded by Givewell to test a chlorination program in Rwanda. I dont love this and my instinct would be I would rather a dedicated experienced chlorination org scaled up to take this on.
In saying that I was super impressed that OneAcre fund and GiveWell decided to stop this trial early because it didn’t seem to be working and one acre fund effectively returned some of the money. Kudos to this high integrity approach to effective aid, super rare to see.