This post brought quite a range of thoughts and feelings about my career applying EA principles. On one hand it was a somewhat difficult-to-swallow reality check of challenges that come with being from a low resource context and trying to have an impactful career, especially in terms of the time it might take. I stopped for a moment, realizing that getting to a point in my career, in my context, where I feel impactful might take a while and could be quite challenging. More than that however, sharing your journey really gave me hope that it’s possible to create an impactful career despite challenges. Creating an impactful career sometimes feels dreamy because of my context, and perhaps because of that, the idea of it ever becoming a reality is so far out of reach that my effort is not as much as it should be. It’s easy to feel alone with any ‘passport’, especially when it usually seems like opportunities to have impact are more possible if u come from a high income country. But hearing your story, and thinking of the idea that anyone has their own ‘passport’, no matter where they are from, makes it easier to accept that my ‘passport’ shouldn’t exclude me from participating in impactful spaces. I really admire your resilience and persistence to follow your dreams. Thank you for sharing this inspirational experience.
Mokhantso
Hello and thank you for making this space available.
From a recruiter’s point of view, what is your take on pitching high impact organizations directly? What, if anything, could make this approach work, and what mistakes do pitchers make? Any other tips on using this approach would be highly appreciated.
Hi,
I am from a lower-middle-income country (Lesotho) and have a Masters in Public Health. I want to use my career to do impactful work related to Health, but there are few organizations in the Effective Altruism community considered as ‘impactful’ in the country, for example none suggested by Givewell. At the same time, the country faces high unemployment rates if I were to consider having an impact through civil service. Options to do good according to effective altruism feel out of reach for me as a citizen of Lesotho. How do I navigate having an impact in a low-resource setting? Thanks so much.
This article is thought provoking and captures the importance of valuing every life, and I think is so important to sensitize people to that value that all life has. The idea that we can’t care enough based on feeling it but should trust numbers in our action to trying to make a change for the better to me is so well expressed. Thank you for this piece.
I read the Africa Jobs Fund launch with genuine excitement.
I am a public health professional from Lesotho, a small, landlocked LMIC with a GDP per capita of around $1,000. I hold an Audiology degree and MPH and yet, like many educated young Basotho, I cannot be fully absorbed by my country’s health system, not because there is no need for my skills, but because the system does not yet have the financing or structural capacity to employ and compensate professionals like me appropriately.
About brain drain-the fear that sending Africa’s best people abroad hollows out the continent. To me, this framing assumes those people are currently contributing productively at home. Many of us are not, though we really want to.Take Lesotho’s audiology profession. There is genuine need. There are trained professionals. But the system cannot pay them, so they seek opportunities elsewhere or remain unemployed. The question is not “should we keep them home?” The question is “what do we do with talent that the local system cannot yet absorb?”
The answer the Fund proposes- deploy them into high-productivity roles abroad, let them earn, let them send remittances, let them build skills, and trust that many will return—matches what I have observed on the ground. I know health professionals who left Lesotho, worked abroad for years, and came back, not because they were forced to, but because home is home. And they came back better: with experience, savings, networks, and confidence that made them more effective than if they had stayed and struggled.
I am not naive about the risks of labour mobility done badly-exploitative recruitment, workers stranded abroad without support, destination countries benefiting while origin countries bear the cost. The Fund’s emphasis on building ethical recruitment infrastructure sounds exactly right.
I am currently in an early stage of building my own career toward global health operations and development. The Africa Jobs Fund represents the kind of structural, systems-level thinking I want to be part of. I’ll be watching closely, and hoping to contribute.