I really like this post and was excited to read it. I find most of it very valuable, which is important for me to say because I’ll only comment on 2 small things:
You quote from the report about racism in aid:
For example, developing countries with black majorities are less likely than those with nonblack majorities to receive their development assistance in the form of country programmable aid (CPA), which is “the portion of aid on which recipient countries have, or could have, a significant say” (Benn, Rogerson, and Steensen 2010, 1; see also Kharas 2008). From 2000 to 2011, countries with black majorities received 63 percent of their bilateral aid as CPA, whereas the rate among all other countries was 79 percent. In other words, black-majority countries are more likely to receive official development assistance in a form that gives them little control over how to use it.
As you wrote in your footnote, I’m not sure I take claims like these at face value, since it’s my impression that aid distributed by recipient governments is inefficient or harmful much of the time, and it’s worse the less democratic a country is. There are only a handful of democracies in Africa. So you’d expect “country programmable aid” in most African countries to not be distributed according to the will of the intended recipients at all.
I’d be much more interested in knowing, for example, what percentage of aid programs were done in cooperation with locals.
Do you know the LEEP (the Lead Exposure Elimination Project)? It was also incubated by CE, and I think it’s another excellent positive example for the kind of thing you’re talking about. They partner with governments and paint manufacturers to regulate and eliminate lead paint from their markets, by building local networks, performing paint studies, and providing information and technical assitance. Their projects page is really exciting.
...Maybe all the orgs that come from CE are like that?
I’d be much more interested in knowing, for example, what percentage of aid programs were done in cooperation with locals.
Yeah, there’s a scale from:
individuals (GiveDirectly)
community projects (the two case studies were operating at a somewhat-community level)
government interventions (KarenInKenya does work on this level… consulting with one or multiple Govts?)
International / top-down (“We’ll buy X mosquito nets and distribute them as efficiently as possible”)
I don’t think there’s much infrastructure set up for enabling communities directly, which I’d be interested to see someone try to design. I think there’s potential. One thing Karen mentions in the 80,000 Hours interview is that you don’t want to burden communities to provide services that they should just have by default, which is why she works at a governmental level to support the government to design and provide these services.
There was also a long tangent of my research into whether EA should be considering community-level infrastructure rather than programmes like GiveDirectly. The Page and Pande paper in the footnotes is pretty interesting and has some good discussion that was cut from the list of most persuasive arguments.
In response to 2.
...Maybe all the orgs that come from CE are like that?
(1) there didn’t seem to be too many that were overtly designed because the founders had insider-positioning in their target community. However, I knew I didn’t have time to research the background story for each founder individually and drawing conclusions from anything less thorough would clearly be bad on multiple levels. Therefore, I cut that thread from the original post.
(2) LEEP and Family Empowerment Media both seemed relevant examples that would be relevant to the post. There are a couple that seem to be policy-based and it’s unclear whether there’s a lot of insider-positioning in these circumstances, and also unclear whether policy initiatives benefit from insider positioning? I’d be excited to discuss this in way more depth.
I really like this post and was excited to read it. I find most of it very valuable, which is important for me to say because I’ll only comment on 2 small things:
You quote from the report about racism in aid:
As you wrote in your footnote, I’m not sure I take claims like these at face value, since it’s my impression that aid distributed by recipient governments is inefficient or harmful much of the time, and it’s worse the less democratic a country is. There are only a handful of democracies in Africa. So you’d expect “country programmable aid” in most African countries to not be distributed according to the will of the intended recipients at all.
I’d be much more interested in knowing, for example, what percentage of aid programs were done in cooperation with locals.
Do you know the LEEP (the Lead Exposure Elimination Project)? It was also incubated by CE, and I think it’s another excellent positive example for the kind of thing you’re talking about. They partner with governments and paint manufacturers to regulate and eliminate lead paint from their markets, by building local networks, performing paint studies, and providing information and technical assitance. Their projects page is really exciting.
...Maybe all the orgs that come from CE are like that?
Thanks for your comment. Glad you liked the post.
In response to 1.
Yeah, there’s a scale from:
individuals (GiveDirectly)
community projects (the two case studies were operating at a somewhat-community level)
government interventions (KarenInKenya does work on this level… consulting with one or multiple Govts?)
International / top-down (“We’ll buy X mosquito nets and distribute them as efficiently as possible”)
I don’t think there’s much infrastructure set up for enabling communities directly, which I’d be interested to see someone try to design. I think there’s potential. One thing Karen mentions in the 80,000 Hours interview is that you don’t want to burden communities to provide services that they should just have by default, which is why she works at a governmental level to support the government to design and provide these services.
There was also a long tangent of my research into whether EA should be considering community-level infrastructure rather than programmes like GiveDirectly. The Page and Pande paper in the footnotes is pretty interesting and has some good discussion that was cut from the list of most persuasive arguments.
In response to 2.
I did a quick audit of Charity Entrepreneurship’s orgs and
(1) there didn’t seem to be too many that were overtly designed because the founders had insider-positioning in their target community. However, I knew I didn’t have time to research the background story for each founder individually and drawing conclusions from anything less thorough would clearly be bad on multiple levels. Therefore, I cut that thread from the original post.
(2) LEEP and Family Empowerment Media both seemed relevant examples that would be relevant to the post. There are a couple that seem to be policy-based and it’s unclear whether there’s a lot of insider-positioning in these circumstances, and also unclear whether policy initiatives benefit from insider positioning? I’d be excited to discuss this in way more depth.