Could it be that their reasoning is this: These three problems are connected in some way, therefore, by tackling some root cause, all these problems can be solved at once?
This line of reasoning is something I’ve anecdotally also heard from several NGOs and activists.
That matches what I’ve seen. In this case, though, they were tackling multiple issues to increase their chances of funding, not because they identified a common root cause.
we agree. Small, cheaper projects that focus on one thing tend to work better. We understand big ambitious projects can have more potential impact and that “impact” is difficult to measure. E.g. if a peace-building project can truly achieve peace, nothing beats that, is just that most peace-building projects are just workshops with people that have no say on whether war or peace will happen.
We prefer avoiding the word impact entirely and talking of effects (intended, visible), this misses some of the biggest opportunities and lots of indirect benefits.
At least a few of the projects could have benefitted from breaking them down into smaller projects and considering them separately in each category. We were going down that road at the beginning but then we thought that wasn’t entirely fair to the other participants. Because many organizations were not fully understanding with how they were going to be evaluated, giving one 3 chances was an unfair advantage.
I think at least one of these projects could have been a finalist on the economic growth section, should it have been broken down in this way, but if the organization applying thought that was a human rights project then we have to compare it on the effects in that category (which we phrased as likelihood of protecting people from abuse, this was the hardest as there is less work on EA on this subject), and then it did not do much but spent lots of money. In any case, this is only relevant for the contest, we tried to have a fair one but that wasn’t the ultimate objective. The contest was only relevant to us as a way to identify cost-effective projects that we would like to support further, it was clear this wasn’t one of them.
Could it be that their reasoning is this: These three problems are connected in some way, therefore, by tackling some root cause, all these problems can be solved at once?
This line of reasoning is something I’ve anecdotally also heard from several NGOs and activists.
That matches what I’ve seen. In this case, though, they were tackling multiple issues to increase their chances of funding, not because they identified a common root cause.
we agree. Small, cheaper projects that focus on one thing tend to work better. We understand big ambitious projects can have more potential impact and that “impact” is difficult to measure. E.g. if a peace-building project can truly achieve peace, nothing beats that, is just that most peace-building projects are just workshops with people that have no say on whether war or peace will happen.
We prefer avoiding the word impact entirely and talking of effects (intended, visible), this misses some of the biggest opportunities and lots of indirect benefits.
At least a few of the projects could have benefitted from breaking them down into smaller projects and considering them separately in each category. We were going down that road at the beginning but then we thought that wasn’t entirely fair to the other participants. Because many organizations were not fully understanding with how they were going to be evaluated, giving one 3 chances was an unfair advantage.
I think at least one of these projects could have been a finalist on the economic growth section, should it have been broken down in this way, but if the organization applying thought that was a human rights project then we have to compare it on the effects in that category (which we phrased as likelihood of protecting people from abuse, this was the hardest as there is less work on EA on this subject), and then it did not do much but spent lots of money. In any case, this is only relevant for the contest, we tried to have a fair one but that wasn’t the ultimate objective. The contest was only relevant to us as a way to identify cost-effective projects that we would like to support further, it was clear this wasn’t one of them.