Despite working in global health myself, I tend to moderately favor devoting additional funding to animal welfare vs. global health. There are two main reasons for this:
Neglectedness: global health receives vastly more funding than animal welfare.
Importance: The level of suffering and cruelty that we inflict on non-human animals is simply unfathomable.
I think the countervailing reason to instead fund global health is:
Tractability: my sense is that, due in part to the far fewer resources that have gone into investigating animal welfare interventions and policy initiatives, it could be difficult to spend $100m in highly impactful ways. (Whereas in global health, there would be obviously good ways to use this funding.) That said, this perhaps just suggests that a substantial portion of additional funding should go towards research (e.g., creating fellowships to incentivize graduate students to work on animal welfare).
I shared your sense in #3 initially, but 2 things changed my mind: the fact that Open Phil has already granted ~$100M/yr in 2021 and 2022 (h/t MichaelStJules’ comment for bringing this to my attention), and Megaprojects for animals, a longlist of “projects that further research might reveal would cost-effectively absorb $10M+/year”, your idea re: funding research included, which seems to promise shovel-ready opportunities for scale-up beyond $100M/yr (let alone $100M granted over an arbitrary period of time, as the problem statement asks).
Despite working in global health myself, I tend to moderately favor devoting additional funding to animal welfare vs. global health. There are two main reasons for this:
Neglectedness: global health receives vastly more funding than animal welfare.
Importance: The level of suffering and cruelty that we inflict on non-human animals is simply unfathomable.
I think the countervailing reason to instead fund global health is:
Tractability: my sense is that, due in part to the far fewer resources that have gone into investigating animal welfare interventions and policy initiatives, it could be difficult to spend $100m in highly impactful ways. (Whereas in global health, there would be obviously good ways to use this funding.) That said, this perhaps just suggests that a substantial portion of additional funding should go towards research (e.g., creating fellowships to incentivize graduate students to work on animal welfare).
I shared your sense in #3 initially, but 2 things changed my mind: the fact that Open Phil has already granted ~$100M/yr in 2021 and 2022 (h/t MichaelStJules’ comment for bringing this to my attention), and Megaprojects for animals, a longlist of “projects that further research might reveal would cost-effectively absorb $10M+/year”, your idea re: funding research included, which seems to promise shovel-ready opportunities for scale-up beyond $100M/yr (let alone $100M granted over an arbitrary period of time, as the problem statement asks).