Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!): Wealthy countries spend a collective $178B on development aid per year − 25% of all giving worldwide. Some aid projects have been cost-effective on a level with Givewell’s top recommendations (eg. PEPFAR), while others have caused outright harm.
Aid is usually distributed via a several step process:
Decide to spend money on aid. Many countries signed a 1970 UN resolution to spend 0.7% of GNI on official development assistance.
Government decides a general strategy / principles.
Government passes a budget, assigning $s to different aid subcategories.
The country’s aid agency decides on projects. Sometimes this is donating to intermediaries like the UN or WHO, sometimes it’s direct.
Projects are implemented.
This area is large scale, tractability is unsure but there are many pathways and some past successes (eg. a grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland increased funding, and the US aid agency ran a cash-benchmarking experiment with GiveDirectly), and few organisations focus on this area compared to the scale.
The author and their co-founder have been funded to start an organization in this area. Get in touch if you’re interested in Global Development and Policy.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Zoe, this summary looks pretty good to us! The only change I would suggest is changing “grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland redirected funding” to “grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland increased funding”, as the result of the campaign was an increase to the overall development cooperation budget in Zurich.
Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
Wealthy countries spend a collective $178B on development aid per year − 25% of all giving worldwide. Some aid projects have been cost-effective on a level with Givewell’s top recommendations (eg. PEPFAR), while others have caused outright harm.
Aid is usually distributed via a several step process:
Decide to spend money on aid. Many countries signed a 1970 UN resolution to spend 0.7% of GNI on official development assistance.
Government decides a general strategy / principles.
Government passes a budget, assigning $s to different aid subcategories.
The country’s aid agency decides on projects. Sometimes this is donating to intermediaries like the UN or WHO, sometimes it’s direct.
Projects are implemented.
This area is large scale, tractability is unsure but there are many pathways and some past successes (eg. a grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland increased funding, and the US aid agency ran a cash-benchmarking experiment with GiveDirectly), and few organisations focus on this area compared to the scale.
The author and their co-founder have been funded to start an organization in this area. Get in touch if you’re interested in Global Development and Policy.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Zoe, this summary looks pretty good to us! The only change I would suggest is changing “grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland redirected funding” to “grassroots EA campaign in Switzerland increased funding”, as the result of the campaign was an increase to the overall development cooperation budget in Zurich.
Thanks!
Edited, thanks :)