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Grace Adams

October Newsletter 2022

Hello and welcome to our October Newsletter!

Our favourite season is almost upon us…Giving Season! We are preparing for our biggest year yet, and we are excited to help more people learn about the incredible impact that effective giving can make.

Join our biggest event this year: Effective Giving Day

The world can be an overwhelming place with all the global challenges we are facing but effective giving gives us the tools to make an outstanding impact, as an individual, but especially as a global community.

Join us for Effective Giving Day this year and discover how you can create up to 100x more impact with your donations. You will hear from experts about how you can find charities that do the most good and get their recommendations on where to donate across a variety of causes.

Effective Giving Day will also feature guests including GWWC co-founder William MacAskill and bestselling author Rutger Bregman who will talk about how effective giving has become an important part of their lives.

If you have questions about charity, giving or high impact causes, we have the experts to answer them! 

 by November 10th and we’ll select some to be answered during the event.

After the event, join us online for a Gathertown event or if you prefer - attend an event in your city (make sure you RSVP to find out about in person events)!


Join Effective Giving Day 2022 on Monday 28th November (29th November for Asia/Pacific) and do more than you thought possible.


We want you to participate in this year's Giving Season campaign!

We’re looking for our community to join us in showcasing how empowering it can be to do good through giving effectively. We want to feature community members talking about why they’re motivated to give effectively and how it’s made a difference to their lives!


Just a short 10 to 30 second video recorded on a smartphone would be fantastic. 

Submit your video here by the 7th of November

 and be involved in sharing effective giving with the world!

Get us to talk at your workplace or community group!

Many people start thinking about how to give back towards the end of the year. If you’d like us to host a talk or workshop at your workplace or with your community group about effective giving over the coming months,

! We are excited to share the ideas of effective giving with new people and have found talks and workshops to be impactful.

We’re excited to continue our mission to create a world where giving effectively and significantly is a cultural norm this Giving Season!


-Grace Adams & the rest of the Giving What We Can team

This month we’ll speak with Anam Abdulla, Senior Manager of the Deworm the World Initiative at Evidence Action. Well known in the EA community for its cost-effective impact, Deworm The World delivers mass school-based deworming programs to parts of the world that most need it. Join us for this Q&A session to learn more about Evidence Action and the Deworm The World Initiative.

 (New York: 5:00 pm; San Francisco: 2:00 pm, Sydney: Sun, Nov. 13, 9:00 am, Auckland: Sun, Nov. 13, 11:00 am)

This month we are joined by Carlita Bevege, the Associate Director, External Relations for Evidence Action. Evidence Action is an organization that scales evidence-based and cost-effective programs, including Dispensers for Safe Water, Deworm the World, as well as running an accelerator program for selecting and assessing “ready-to-scale” interventions. Please join us for this Q&A session to learn more about the work that Evidence Action does and the impact of the programs they run.

 (London: 9:30 am, Munich: 10:30 am, Mumbai: 3:00 pm, Singapore: 5:30 pm)

Our open forum is an event where you can come along with questions about effective giving and/or to meet others interested in effective giving. This event alternates between Europe/Asia and Americas/Oceania each month.

 (London: 7:00 pm, Munich: 8:00 pm, New York 2:00 pm, San Francisco: 11:00 am)

Isn’t poverty just a symptom and not the real problem we should be addressing?

GiveWell finds the world’s best charities. Here’s how they do it.

Today, we can do more good than ever before. So why aren’t we?

Climate change & Africa: Lily Odarno, Clean Air Task Force

Find audio-only versions of new YouTube content on the 

#11 - Neil Buddy Shah: A deep dive into GiveWell’s work

If you’re in the USA and are planning to donate during this giving season, EA Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity for you to maximise your donations! Facebook will be offering donation matches starting from 6am (EST) on the 29th of November. You can learn more about this on the 

A new introductory essay on Effective Altruism

 was recently published on EffectiveAltruism.org.

, a list which features people that “embody the question Future Perfect asks every day: How do we make the future a better place for everyone?”. Everyone on this list is deserving and it features some of our members including founding member, economist 

 of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project.

announced the winners of the EA criticism contest

A critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness models

Methods for improving uncertainty analysis in EA cost-effectiveness models

Population Ethics without Axiology: A Framework

 answering some of the questions it's gotten from donors about the 

 for a chlorine dispenser program, Dispensers for Safe Water, and about its overall 

. Chlorination appears to be a promising way to reduce child mortality in areas with unsafe water. Since recommending the grant for Dispensers for Safe Water in January of this year, GiveWell has been exploring other chlorination interventions, such as 

 it recommended to Malaria Consortium for seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC), and a 

 to Bridges to Prosperity (B2P) to fund the construction of additional trailbridges as part of a study of B2P's program. B2P builds trailbridges in rural communities to help residents access schools and markets, which GiveWell believes may increase household income.

GiveWell strongly encourages followers of its work to 

consider applying for its Senior Researcher position

, or sharing the opening with someone who may be interested.

Animal Charity Evaluators turned 10 as well as recently released a new 

 for animal charities to help them become more effective.

Supreme Court grapples with animal welfare in a challenge to a California law requiring pork to be humanely raised

Battery hen and animal testing laws could be scrapped because of Brexit, warns RSPCA

 discuss wild animal welfare as a problem profile

learning more about what they hope to achieve

Fifty Two, which delivers news through journalism and art from the Indian subcontinent presents 

Keep up to date with New Incentives with 

 with Trevor Noah talking about future generations.

Read about some of the people who are leading the way in protecting the long0term future in 

 for an ICTA-UAB project that will study how to escape from a growth economy and ensure social welfare and planetary sustainability.

The carbon-free energy resource you’ve never heard of: superhot rock energy

Lily Odarno from Clean Air Task Force

 by setting up a recurring donation to a highly-effective charity today! 

 to help grow our community and multiply your impact.

 with Giving What We Can and effective altruism.

Discuss effective giving and effective altruism on the 

 for more news and articles.

Do you have questions about the pledge, Giving What We Can, or effective altruism in general? Check out our 

Caroline Wood

‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’

This popular saying is often used to illustrate the argument that, over the long-term, it is more efficient to address the fundamental issues causing a problem rather than relying on ‘quick fixes.’ For example, the effective altruism (EA) community, along with other organisations which work to alleviate poverty, has occasionally been criticised for focusing on short-term solutions instead of tackling the root causes of poverty. Sometimes these interventions are given the (rather derogatory) name ‘band-aid’ solutions, implying that they merely cover up the superficial symptoms of poverty like a bandage would, without doing anything to improve the underlying situation.

But is this really fair? After all, achieving systemic change takes time, and may even eclipse the lifetimes of those suffering right here and now. Sometimes, a quick-fix might actually be the most empowering thing you can do, and be 

the first step that helps break the cycle of poverty

 found that children who received deworming treatment had significantly fewer school absences, and earned 13% more income as adults, compared with children who did not receive the treatment. Given that deworming treatment costs less than $1 US per child per year, the researchers estimated the social rate of return to be 37%. Not bad for a band-aid surely?

Nevertheless, it’s true that a lack of strategy or long-term thinking can allow problems to perpetuate, or even get worse. For instance, providing food to the hungry through charity-funded food banks 

may shift the responsibility from governments, making them less compelled to introduce state support

. Similarly, although camps for refugees and displaced people are a quick solution to save lives and provide food, water, shelter, and medical care, they are incredibly costly to run, undignified, and can lead to long-term dependency. Paul Spiegel, a former senior official at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 

 would introduce policies to give displaced people work permits, besides access to educational and healthcare systems within their host countries.

Perhaps the ultimate band-aid example comes from ‘

’ itself: the charity supergroup founded in 1984 by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to raise money for anti-famine efforts in Ethiopia. This culminated in the legendary 1985 Live Aid concert, which raised $127 million, sparking real hope that this would start to reverse Ethiopia’s desperate levels of poverty. But 35 years later, 

Ethiopia remains a ‘Humanitarian Catastrophe’

, crippled by drought, famine and conflict. 

, key reasons for this include lack of investment in broad, long-term policies for agricultural development, managing natural resources, and credit/insurance.

When we consider the examples above, it can seem obvious that the most effective strategy would be to tackle the major causes of suffering - as the fifteen-year 

 aimed to do. These addressed eight grand challenges, with the first being to ‘eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.’ And indeed, the goals definitely made some progress towards this: within the project’s timeframe 

the number of those living in extreme poverty

 halved, reducing the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015. However, several reasons mean that addressing the root causes of poverty that remain will be much, 

1. Poverty looks very different depending on where you are

In some countries, while only a small proportion of their population lives in poverty, this translates into large 

 numbers. For instance, the countries with the highest numbers of people living below the poverty line are India, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, 

which have a combined total of over 280 million people

. But there are many smaller countries that have higher 

 levels of poverty: in South Sudan and Burundi, for example, 

around 80% of the population lives below the poverty line

. On top of this, each country has its own unique combination of political systems, infrastructure, environmental resources, cultural traditions, and foreign policy. Improving people’s livelihoods as quickly as possible will therefore require an individual, tailored plan for every region.

2. Poverty is now concentrated in extremely challenging environments

Most (96%) of those living in extreme poverty 

live in countries that are environmentally vulnerable, politically unstable, or both

the largest recipient countries of international humanitarian aid are burdened with protracted or recurring crises

. In these circumstances it is difficult, if not impossible, to plot a route out of poverty, and this is typically well beyond the scope of a charity or NGO to deal with. 

Writing for Vox, journalist and EA advocate Kelsey Piper put it this way:

“… there’s no doubt that it’s significantly more complex to identify the best ways to do good in [lobbying and advocacy work] than it is to identify the best ways to distribute bednets.”

3. Solving poverty is not a linear process

Unlike giving a child a vaccination or installing a well, solving poverty isn’t a simple ‘once it’s done, it’s done’ process. The overall success of the Millennium Development Goals wasn’t felt everywhere, 

with some areas experiencing little change and 30 countries seeing the number of people living in extreme poverty actually increase

. Furthermore, sudden conflicts and political instability can rapidly undo decades of slow policy change, 

4. Assumptions about the best way out of poverty aren't always correct

It is often assumed that if you can increase a country’s economic growth, poverty levels will naturally fall, but this isn’t always the case in reality. Without policies that ensure that increased wealth is distributed across many levels of society, 

growth alone typically lifts few people out of poverty

. We also lack measures that link overall economic growth with the amount of poverty within a country. One of the most commonly used measures, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), simply measures the total value of goods produced and services provided in a country during one year, 

but it doesn’t say anything about how this wealth is shared, and the gulf between the highest and lowest levels of society.

 Economic growth can simply lead to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, 

particularly if there are high levels of corruption.

Arbitrary attempts to change systems are unlikely to have positive effects, 

particularly if we aren’t clear on what the causes of the problem are, and what the best solutions may be

. Even worse, they can actually do harm, especially when led by rich Westerners who assume that their money and background means they have more knowledge and expertise than local groups 

(also known as ‘White Saviour Complex’).

In combination, these reasons mean that addressing poverty at a systems-level — whether through advocacy, policy engagement or research — carries a much higher risk of being ineffective or totally unsuccessful. 

An evidence-based approach to systemic change

However, since ‘bigger picture’ approaches can (if successful) have a much higher 

impact, we shouldn’t disregard them completely. Thanks to increasingly sophisticated data sources and new approaches, the EA community is beginning to also assess charities working for systemic change. For instance, in 2019 

GiveWell announced that it would be expanding its scope

 to include interventions where causality is harder to establish, as part of its mission to provide guidance on everything that could potentially be among the most cost-effective giving opportunities. This could include charities that provide technical assistance, work to influence government policies, organisations undertaking research and development, or groups supporting social entrepreneurship.

The aim is to support the best charities, using evidence as a guide (bearing in mind that 

). Some examples of evidence-based charities include:

to ban the pesticides that cause accidental poisonings and are used most in suicides

. Ending the ready availability of these harmful substances could prevent thousands of deaths each year.

 to support small business owners. This can have major ripple effects within families, for instance by generating enough income to enable children to attend school.

Public health campaigns, including anti-smoking legislation, 

, strategies to tackle air pollution, and stronger policies against counterfeit medicines. These promote healthier environments, leading to greater societal wellbeing.

Organisations lobbying for producers in low- and middle-income countries 

. This can open up new markets and income sources for farmers working at all scales.

 to be given to the poorest countries, thus removing a severe constraint on national economic growth.


In all cases, working for societal change is most likely to succeed 

when there is a focused strategy, and donor charities work in partnership with local communities

, drawing on their expertise, resources, and connections. For instance, 

the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention (CPSP)

 collaborates with local and regional governments to collect information on the use of lethal pesticides in their country, then trains local researchers to identify the suicide, accidental poisoning, and environmental consequences of their use.

At the end of the day, the distinctions between short-term, individualised solutions and societal change can be highly arbitrary, and not the most helpful way to evaluate charities. The band-aid metaphor, for instance, assumes that the intervention can only be applied retrospectively - it can’t stop you getting the cut in the first place. But many so-called band-aid solutions can actually prevent the harm from happening, for example 

providing vitamin A supplements to stop children from developing blindness

In any case, a charity’s strategy will likely include both direct interventions and broader, systemic work. For instance, despite their big picture approach, the successes of the Millennium Development Goals were partly achieved through apparently short-term methods, including distributing millions of measles vaccinations and insecticide-treated mosquito nets.

the guiding principle for effective altruism remains the same

: to support charities which the evidence suggests will achieve the most good

 to donate a portion of your regular income to help the world’s poorest, then you are already part of a systemic change within society — one that asks ‘What can I give?’ instead of ‘What can I get?’ Telling others about your decision and explaining effective altruism to your friends and family can have a ripple effect that sees even more people lifted out of poverty. And isn’t that a beautiful thing?

In this guest blog, Caroline Wood addresses whether trying to eliminate poverty  through charity is just a 'band-aid' fix to larger systemic problems.

Blog

October Newsletter 2022

Isn’t poverty just a symptom and not the real problem we should be addressing?

Have us talk to your workplace/group this Giving Season!

Member Profile: Timeo Williams

September Newsletter 2022

Should charity begin at home?

Member Profile: Fernando Martin-Gullans

Announcement: Renaming of legal entity to Effective Ventures Foundation

Rutger Bregman on Effective Giving: Interview with Effektiv Spenden

What is counterfactual thinking and why should you care about it?