Thanks for this ace article Morgan, I especially like “Fight against a sense of urgency when it builds up.”
I love this a lot and can already feel this among other orgs. A few people have said “Nick, think about how you could absorb more money soon” and I’ve been asked 3 times in the last 6 months by donors something like “could you take an extra 3-5 million dollars right now”.
These questions aren’t unreasonable, but the donors also need to be careful to not ramp up that urgency too much among us doers.
I feel like a lot of orgs will scramble to find ways to “absorb” money and grow. I think this will be a far bigger problem with the already-big BINGOs more than smaller orgs, because their claims to be able to absorb an extra 500 million or whatever will be both more public and more plausible.
We should be especially suspicious of orgs proposing brand new activities in the midst of this felt urgency that deviate from what they have been doing for some time.
My one disagreement is that “vaccine uptake and cash transfer programs in themselves could absorb a huge proportion of these funds, through government spending, GAVI, and organizations such as GiveDirectly.” I don’t think the Math maths on this front, and the CDG article doesn’t answer this question well either.
Looking at GiveDirectly specifically who might be the best placed org in the whole world to absorb lots of money cost-effectively and quickly, they say on their website they could spend 1.4 Billion in the next 3 years (sounds reasonable). The most they have ever spent in a year is 250 million dollars—I wouldn’t think more than doubling this year on year would be realistic.
The last thing I would want to do is give money to low-income governments to give away. This would be an absolute corruption fest and extremely poorly targeted. There’s already good evidence of this—look at Uganda’s recent cash giveaway program… GAVI could probably absorb a decent chunk, but we also don’t want to disrupt their program of forcing countries to slowly take over their own vaccine spend.
Thanks for this ace article Morgan, I especially like “Fight against a sense of urgency when it builds up.”
I love this a lot and can already feel this among other orgs. A few people have said “Nick, think about how you could absorb more money soon” and I’ve been asked 3 times in the last 6 months by donors something like “could you take an extra 3-5 million dollars right now”.
These questions aren’t unreasonable, but the donors also need to be careful to not ramp up that urgency too much among us doers.
I feel like a lot of orgs will scramble to find ways to “absorb” money and grow. I think this will be a far bigger problem with the already-big BINGOs more than smaller orgs, because their claims to be able to absorb an extra 500 million or whatever will be both more public and more plausible.
We should be especially suspicious of orgs proposing brand new activities in the midst of this felt urgency that deviate from what they have been doing for some time.
My one disagreement is that “vaccine uptake and cash transfer programs in themselves could absorb a huge proportion of these funds, through government spending, GAVI, and organizations such as GiveDirectly.” I don’t think the Math maths on this front, and the CDG article doesn’t answer this question well either.
Looking at GiveDirectly specifically who might be the best placed org in the whole world to absorb lots of money cost-effectively and quickly, they say on their website they could spend 1.4 Billion in the next 3 years (sounds reasonable). The most they have ever spent in a year is 250 million dollars—I wouldn’t think more than doubling this year on year would be realistic.
The last thing I would want to do is give money to low-income governments to give away. This would be an absolute corruption fest and extremely poorly targeted. There’s already good evidence of this—look at Uganda’s recent cash giveaway program… GAVI could probably absorb a decent chunk, but we also don’t want to disrupt their program of forcing countries to slowly take over their own vaccine spend.