A lot of people here donate to givedirectly.org, with the philosophy that we should let the worlds poorest decide where money needs to be spent to improve their lives. Grassroots projects like this seem like a natural extension of this, where a community as a whole decides where they need resources in order to uplift everyone. I’m no GHD expert, and I would encourage an in depth analysis, but it’s at least plausible that this could be more effective than givedirectly, as this project is too large to be paid for under that model.
Grassroots organising seems like a good idea in general: by cutting most of the westerners out of the process, the money goes into the third world economy. We could also see knock-on effects: maybe altruistic philosophy becomes more popular throughout Uganda, and they are more receptive to, say, animal rights later on in their development.
I think more estimates around cost effectiveness is a good idea, but EA had funded far more speculative and dubious projects in recent memory. I would encourage EA funders to give the proposal a fair shot.
Grassroots projects like this seem like a natural extension of this, where a community as a whole decides where they need resources in order to uplift everyone.
This makes sense, but I don’t think it gets us very far on the question of whether to fund this particular project.
There are many grassroots projects in developing countries, and it is often difficult for a Westerner to evaluate the effectiveness of those projects (at least where their theory of impact is more complex than bednets --> less malaria). It’s even difficult for us to assess the relative extent of informed public support for a grassroots project from afar. Those issues are less formidable with GiveDirectly; if the main theory of impact is to benefit Person X, we have both theoretical reasons and experiential evidence that giving Person X money is a good way to accomplish that. That doesn’t necessarily scale well to supporting grassroots work.
That being said, I can see a decent theoretical argument for (as it were) GiveDirectly for Communities—give a community a certain amount of money, and let the community decide what needs that money should go to. I can see a number of practical problems with that, though. I think your average Westerner is going to be considerably worse at evaluating projects valued at ~50 times GDP per capita than in making their own consumption/investment decisions, and I suspect that may be true in many places. The quality of many decisions made by various democratic political systems also gives me pause. So I think there would need to be evaluation and selection of proposals rather than the total deference of the GiveDirectly approach.
Ideally, we would have evaluation organizations that were more local to the populations that were being served, rather than having the big GH/D evaluator be in the United States. That should give us evaluators with more local knowledge, and (to be honest) those with a cost structure and business processes that would make evaluating five-to-six figure projects more feasible.
I think the combination of bottom-up approach of local communities proposing their own improvements with EA-style rigorous quantitative evaluation (which, like you say would be best undertaken by evaluators based in similar LMICs) is potentially really powerful, and I’m not sure the extent to which it’s already been tried in mainstream aid.
Or possibly even better from a funding perspective, turn that round and have an organization that helps local social entrepreneurs secure institutional funding for their projects (a little bit like Charity Entrepreneurship). Existing aid spend is enormous, but I don’t think it’s easy for people like Antony to access.
I also think there’s the potential for interesting online interaction between the different local social entrepreneurs (especially those who have already part-completed projects with stories to share), putative future donors and other generally interested Westerners who might bring other perspectives to the table. I’m not sure to what extent and where that happens at the moment.
A lot of people here donate to givedirectly.org, with the philosophy that we should let the worlds poorest decide where money needs to be spent to improve their lives. Grassroots projects like this seem like a natural extension of this, where a community as a whole decides where they need resources in order to uplift everyone. I’m no GHD expert, and I would encourage an in depth analysis, but it’s at least plausible that this could be more effective than givedirectly, as this project is too large to be paid for under that model.
Grassroots organising seems like a good idea in general: by cutting most of the westerners out of the process, the money goes into the third world economy. We could also see knock-on effects: maybe altruistic philosophy becomes more popular throughout Uganda, and they are more receptive to, say, animal rights later on in their development.
I think more estimates around cost effectiveness is a good idea, but EA had funded far more speculative and dubious projects in recent memory. I would encourage EA funders to give the proposal a fair shot.
This makes sense, but I don’t think it gets us very far on the question of whether to fund this particular project.
There are many grassroots projects in developing countries, and it is often difficult for a Westerner to evaluate the effectiveness of those projects (at least where their theory of impact is more complex than bednets --> less malaria). It’s even difficult for us to assess the relative extent of informed public support for a grassroots project from afar. Those issues are less formidable with GiveDirectly; if the main theory of impact is to benefit Person X, we have both theoretical reasons and experiential evidence that giving Person X money is a good way to accomplish that. That doesn’t necessarily scale well to supporting grassroots work.
That being said, I can see a decent theoretical argument for (as it were) GiveDirectly for Communities—give a community a certain amount of money, and let the community decide what needs that money should go to. I can see a number of practical problems with that, though. I think your average Westerner is going to be considerably worse at evaluating projects valued at ~50 times GDP per capita than in making their own consumption/investment decisions, and I suspect that may be true in many places. The quality of many decisions made by various democratic political systems also gives me pause. So I think there would need to be evaluation and selection of proposals rather than the total deference of the GiveDirectly approach.
Ideally, we would have evaluation organizations that were more local to the populations that were being served, rather than having the big GH/D evaluator be in the United States. That should give us evaluators with more local knowledge, and (to be honest) those with a cost structure and business processes that would make evaluating five-to-six figure projects more feasible.
I think the combination of bottom-up approach of local communities proposing their own improvements with EA-style rigorous quantitative evaluation (which, like you say would be best undertaken by evaluators based in similar LMICs) is potentially really powerful, and I’m not sure the extent to which it’s already been tried in mainstream aid.
Or possibly even better from a funding perspective, turn that round and have an organization that helps local social entrepreneurs secure institutional funding for their projects (a little bit like Charity Entrepreneurship). Existing aid spend is enormous, but I don’t think it’s easy for people like Antony to access.
I also think there’s the potential for interesting online interaction between the different local social entrepreneurs (especially those who have already part-completed projects with stories to share), putative future donors and other generally interested Westerners who might bring other perspectives to the table. I’m not sure to what extent and where that happens at the moment.