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Michelle Hutchinson

In just five years, Giving What We Can has grown to over 1150 members in 30 countries worldwide. The community has pledged over $450m towards ending poverty. We are looking for additional hires to build on this success.

As Director of Growth you will be ensuring that interest in effective giving actually translates to more donations to effective charities, and thereby more people helped. You would be reporting to the Executive Director, Michelle Hutchinson.

Specifically, you would be responsible for:

Reaching out to people interested in donating effectively to offer answers to questions and other assistance

Chatting to people one on one about questions and concerns they might have about joining Giving What We Can, doing Try Giving, or donating to top charities.

Following up with people who requested more information or planned to get more involved later on, and ensuring that we have a reliable system for keeping track of them.

We’re a small team, so you’ll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media and whatever else most interests you.

Be at the heart of an inspiring community of people who care about others and really put their passion into practice

: We have members all around the world, all of whom are dedicating a large part of their income to helping others as much as they can, and supporting each other in doing so. You would be getting to know these members, answering their questions, providing support to them and helping them to help others.

Work with friendly and intellectual staff

: You’d be working alongside a talented, interesting and highly motivated team.

: Giving What We Can shares an office with the rest of the Centre for Effective Altruism and with the Future of Humanity Institute, which is part of the University of Oxford. There are always fascinating people around, and we often hold joint seminars and training sessions, as well as many social events.

Be part of a fast-growing organisation and social movement

: It’s a hugely exciting place to be, and has opportunities for swiftly increasing responsibility

: Each new member of Giving What We Can saves around 10 lives, meaning that the right person in this job could help prevent over 100 unnecessary deaths each year!

This role has great potential for impact: Over the past couple of years, Giving What We Can has reached millions of people with its message of committing to donate the most effective charities. It’s crucial to ensure that people have all the information they need to act on that message. By leading our individual outreach, you can help move thousands of pounds to charity. In so doing, you would be interacting on a daily basis with large numbers of people who are passionate about helping others. As one of the key team members of a rapidly growing small organisation, you’ll have great responsibility, autonomy and room to grow.

If you work for Giving What We Can, you’ll be part of a focused team of intelligent, caring, enthusiastic colleagues who want to change the world, located in beautiful Oxford.

We’re looking for someone who cares deeply about alleviating extreme poverty as effectively as possible and is excited to get others on board with that aim.

You’ll need excellent written and spoken communications skills, to enjoy interacting with large numbers of people, be very conscientious and thrive as part of a team.

Some examples of experience that would be especially useful include journalism and sales – though we’re interested in anyone who can demonstrate the skills. Also helpful would be experience with customer relationship management systems such as CiviCRM or Salesforce.

Candidates will be selected on the following traits, and should aim to demonstrate them in their application:

We would be willing to negotiate a starting salary between £19,000 and £25,000, depending on experience. Salaries are raised by £1,000 each six months conditional on good performance.

We're also interested in open applications:

As a rapidly growing team, we are always on the look-out for dedicated and talented team members. As a young organisation, we are still in the process of developing the best strategy and our plans change rapidly. We are therefore particularly open to considering applications from candidates with broad skill sets and enthusiasm for work in a number of areas. If you think you’d be a good fit for our team in a capacity other than the specific roles we’re advertising, we’d love to hear from you. Amongst the skills which would be particularly useful to our team are:

Giving What We Can is Hiring! Director of Growth.

As Research analyst, you would help our efforts to find the charities which most effectively alleviate extreme poverty and advise the Giving What We Can community in their donation decisions. You would be reporting to our Director of Research, Hauke Hillebrandt.

Part of your role will be working with the ED and the Director of Research to determine what the best research strategy for GWWC is. That process will affect what the precise remit of the role is. Your strengths and interests will also determine what the focus of the role ends up being. The areas within which your activities will lie are:

Helping to determine which charities we should recommend – based on both the effectiveness of the interventions the charities carry out, and how well those organisations implement them

Understanding the broader landscape of top charitable interventions and organisations, in order to advise our members when deciding where to donate

Presenting the research in compelling ways in order to encourage people to donate to the most effective charities, both via our website and through presentations

Supervising student volunteers on their research projects

We are a small team, so you’ll also have the opportunity to be involved in recruitment, fundraising, publishing our findings in the media, and whatever else most interests you.

This role combines great potential for impact with great potential for growth and learning. In determining which charities Giving What We Can recommends, you will be influencing a rapidly expanding pool of donations, already over a million pounds each year, in order to help those in extreme poverty as much as possible. As one of the key team members of a rapidly growing small organisation, you’ll have a huge amount of responsibility, autonomy and room to grow.

If you work for Giving What We Can, you’ll be part of a focused team of intelligent, caring, enthusiastic colleagues who want to change the world, located in the centre of beautiful Oxford.

We’re looking for someone who cares deeply about extreme poverty and is fascinated by the question of how we can most quickly eradicate it.

You’ll need a combination of research skills honed on messy real-world problems, and clear written communication. The ideal candidate would also have excellent presentation skills and experience dealing with media in order to be able to take their research to a wide audience.

Some examples of experience that would be especially useful include:

monitoring and impact evaluation in the charitable or business sector

general knowledge about evaluation of scientific reports and white papers

knowledge of statistics and quantitative research methods

finance (especially venture capital and hedge funds)

global health / (international) public health / public health

development economics (poverty economics)

supervision of students’ research projects

science communication experience (e.g. science blogging, giving talks)

However, we’re interested in anyone who can demonstrate the skills.

Giving What We Can is Hiring! Research Analyst.

Henry Phipps

Many people express the concern that population growth is a barrier to development

 . Different mechanisms have been postulated as to how population growth could impede development. For instance, when parents have large families they may be less able to invest in their children, whether this be by providing them adequate nutrition, healthcare or schooling. [1] [2] [3]The effects of this lack of investment are thought to undermine development.

Sometimes these concerns are raised regarding charities that save lives through medical interventions, with some claiming that money would be better spent limiting population growth. What’s more, if limiting population growth is an objective for development, then saving lives might at first glance seem to run counter to this goal.

One popular response is to argue that saving lives does nothing to increase population growth and in fact actually decreases population growth

 . The Gates Foundation and Gap Minder have both claimed that reducing mortality causes the fertility of the population (the number of children per woman) to decrease. The long-term effect of this is will be to reduce population growth. [4][5]

There are biological reasons for supposing high levels of mortality will not constitute a barrier to population growth. The death of an infant will lead to a cessation of breastfeeding meaning that the mother is able to fall pregnant again sooner than if the child had survived. [6]Further, if a large family size is desired for cultural or economic reasons, parents may take into account high levels of mortality by having more children in order to ensure that they reach their desired family size. [7]

Reducing mortality may actually decrease population growth. We might think that parents choose to have large numbers of children because they rely on at least some of their children surviving to provide for them in old age and carry on the family lineage. If mortality is high then parents will choose to have more children to try to increase the odds that at least some of them reach adulthood. However, if mortality is lowered, parents will have more confidence that their children will reach adulthood. Therefore they will have less of an incentive to conceive more children. [8]

If the above arguments are sound, then we have a strong response to concerns about population growth. By saving lives we also reduce population growth. But is this always the case?

In this report I look at the link between mortality reduction and population growth. I find that 

we should not be confident that reducing mortality will always reduce population growth

Methods other than reducing mortality seem more effective in reducing population growth.

A Strong Correlation Between Mortality and Decreased Fertility

Since 1950 we have seen extremely strong correlations between reductions in mortality and reductions in fertility. [9] [10]A recent review states that:

“A ‘folk regression’ of the fertility trend on the mortality trend would conclude that saving one life prevents two births.” [11]

no country has ever experienced a fall in fertility without first experiencing a fall in mortality

 . Contrary to popular belief, it does not look like we are heading towards an ever increasing population. Across most of the world, we have seen dramatic reductions in fertility accompanying drops in mortality. In Europe and North America the number of children per family has fallen to between 2 and 3 children, which keeps the population at its current size. In Latin America and Asia, we have also seen rapid convergence to lower fertility rates, with many countries that were once characterised by large families now near the fertility rates of the richest countries. [12]

If family size remained at around 2 children we would see dramatic population growth over the next few decades due to decreased mortality, but ultimately by 2100 the population size would stabilise. [13]

But correlation does not mean causation. 

The drop in mortality since 1950 took place alongside many other developments such as economic growth, increasing levels of education, female empowerment, and provision and acceptance of family planning services.

 Although we might expect all of these trends to lead to decreased fertility, identifying the relative effect of each of these factors is extremely difficult. [14]

For one, it is plausible that there are complex causal relationships between each of these factors. Maybe a combination of increased education and decreasing mortality is needed to see any significant impact on fertility. Also, the desire to limit family size might struggle to translate into drastically lower fertility without widely available modern methods of contraception.

That reductions in mortality are not always the best way to reduce population growth can be seen by comparing the fertility rates of different countries. Both Bangladesh and Niger have traditionally had large family sizes. Bangladesh has now reached a fertility rate of 2.4 children per women whereas Niger has a fertility rate of over 7 children per woman. It does not look like a high level of mortality is the main issue preventing Niger from reaching lower levels of fertility. In Bangladesh child mortality fell at a steady rate from 198.4 out of 1000 in 1980, to 143.7 out of 1000 in 1990. During this time total fertility dropped from 6.4 children per woman to 4.6 children per woman. Contrast this with recent developments in Niger: over a ten year period between 1998 and 2008, Niger experienced an even more dramatic fall in child mortality than was seen in Bangladesh, from 245.2 per 1000 to 141.4 per 1000, yet total fertility only fell from 7.8 to 7.6. [15]

To cite another example, Ethiopia and Uganda have similar levels of child mortality. In 2010, under 5 mortality was 75.6 per thousand in Ethiopia and 78.4 per thousand in Uganda. Both countries had seen large drops in child mortality since 1990 when under 5 mortality stood at 205 per thousand in Ethiopia and 178.7 in Uganda. Yet total fertility in Ethiopia presently stands at 4.8 children per woman as opposed to 6.2 children per woman in Uganda. It doesn’t look like it is high levels of mortality that are preventing Uganda from reaching Ethiopian levels of fertility. [16]

A recent review of the literature relating mortality to decreased fertility and population growth by David Roodman came to the following conclusion:

I think the best interpretation of the available evidence is that the impact of life-saving interventions on fertility and population growth varies by context, above all with total fertility, and is rarely greater than 1:1 [rarely enough for the fertility decline to exceed the mortality decline in terms of effect on population size]. In places where lifetime births/woman has converging to 2 or lower, family size is largely a conscious choice, made with an ideal family size in mind, and achieved in part by access to modern contraception. In those contexts, saving one child’s life should lead parents to avert a birth they would otherwise have. The impact of mortality drops on fertility will be nearly 1:1, so population growth will hardly change.

we should be wary of supposing that further decreases in mortality in high fertility countries will lead to decreased population growth

 . Indeed, as the above extract claims, in some contexts decreasing mortality may be increasing population growth as the impact of declining fertility on population growth may be less than the contribution of more people living long enough to start families of their own. The above review claims that in certain countries, such as Niger and Mali, for every six children that do not die in infancy, only 3 or 2 fewer children will be born. Here, saving lives can be expected to increase population in the short-term. [18]

Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the causal pathways relating mortality to population growth are complex and difficult to assess. In some contexts high levels of mortality might well have been the chief barrier to decreasing fertility. Additionally, although the effect of mortality decreases on fertility might be weak in isolation, it might be that in some contexts decreasing mortality alongside other interventions may be necessary to reduce fertility and limit population growth. This belief is evidenced in another review of the literature:

“If a consensus emerges at all from the wealth of past studies on mortality and fertility declines, it would be that while a direct, independent effect of mortality change on fertility change is often found to be weak, ‘child survival and family planning programs play important complementary roles’.” [19]



It seems fair to say that 

we cannot assume that decreasing mortality is an effective means of reducing population growth. The impact of reduced mortality on population growth will depend on the specific context in which the reduction takes place

Those who are concerned with the effects of population growth on development should predominantly be concerned about Sub-Saharan Africa. Whereas other regions of the world have converged on or are about to converge on average fertility rate of just over two children per family, fertility declines in Sub-Saharan Africa have lagged behind the rest of the world. [20]This lag in declining fertility rates is projected to lead to high levels of population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. [21]

A particular extreme example is that of Niger, where the population has tripled since the 1970s and is expected to triple again before 2030. [22] Fertility declines have begun later and been slower in Sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions. [23]In part this might be due to the fact that declines in mortality took place later than in other regions. But it appears that there are other factors which are preventing a more rapid decline in fertility.

Some of these are regional-specific factors that lead to a desire for large families, including religious beliefs, marriage practices and communal land ownership. [24]However, many of these factors - such as low levels of female education and a lack of governmental enthusiasm for family planning - have been faced in other areas. [25]

The success of some African countries in dramatically lowering fertility has been attributed to the provision of family planning programmes. This is the case in Ethiopia [26], Kenya [27(which reached a fertility rate of 4.6 in 2010), and Rwanda [29], which has seen a particularly dramatic decline in fertility from 6.1 in 2005 to 4.6 in 2010.

We have good reason to suppose that decreasing child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa will lead to decreases in fertility. But we also have good reason to think that in many instances falls in mortality may in fact lead to population growth in the short term, as the decrease in fertility may be outweighed by the increasing number of people who survive to have families of their own.

Comparing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to one another as well as to countries from other regions indicates that factors other than the level of mortality are the major impediment to decreasing fertility and population growth. We have good reason to believe the conclusion of a recent UN report that suggests that 

the most effective means to achieve decreases in fertility and population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa would be to invest in family planning services and female education.

Mortality, Population Growth and Aid: Some Conclusions

Decreasing mortality may have an important role to play in moving to a low fertility society. Nevertheless, we cannot assume that reducing mortality in a particular instance will lead to decreases in fertility that are significant enough to outweigh the direct contribution to population growth caused by reduced mortality.

the major barrier to decreasing fertility and population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa today is not high mortality but factors such as the low levels of female education and lack of family planning programmes

 . If reducing population growth is of overriding concern, it seems that the most effective means to do this would be to attempt to implement the above programmes rather than trying to further reduce mortality.

reducing population growth is but one concern amongst many when deciding which interventions to support in low income countries

 . Just how damaging population growth is for development is unclear and there is dispute as to whether it is particularly damaging at all. Even if population growth does significantly impede development, 

it is still plausible that donating to charities that directly save lives and reduce morbidity confers more valuable benefit than donating to charities that try to reduce population growth.

Finally and most importantly, the historical record shows us that 

we are able to massively reduce fertility and thus (in the long-term) population growth whilst also dramatically reducing mortality

 . Additionally, over the long-term it is plausible that these processes are mutually supporting. Concerns about population growth at worst may give reason to move marginal dollars from health interventions to interventions supporting other causes such as family planning, but they certainly do not give any reason to abandon the process of attempting to reduce mortality and morbidity in low income countries.

[1]Health and Economic Growth, Wile pp. 656-657 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780444535405000033#





[2]When Does Improving Health Raise GDP?, Ashref et al p. 8





http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3860117/





[3]Copenhagen Consensus 2012 Challenge Paper on Population Growth, Kohler p.50



[4]Gates Foundation Annual Letter 2014





http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/Resources-and-Media/Annual-Letters-List/Annual-Letter-2014





[5]Will saving poor children lead to overpopulation?





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkSO9pOVpRM





[6]Mortality Decline and the Demographic Response: Toward a New Agenda, Montgomery pp 5-6.





http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.175.9555&rep=rep1&type=pdf





[7]Ibid



[8]Will saving poor children lead to overpopulation?





http://blog.givewell.org/2008/08/03/infant-mortality-and-overpopulation/





[10]Macroeconomics and Health: Investing in Health for Economic Development, Sachs pp. 35-38.



[11] 

http://davidroodman.com/blog/2014/04/16/the-mortality-fertility-link/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E





[18]Ibid



[19]Demographic pressure, economic development, and social engineering: An assessment of fertility declines in the second half of the twentieth century. Heuveline p.389.



[20]How Exceptional is the Pattern of Fertility Decline in Sub-Saharan Africa? Bongaarts pp. 1-4.



[21]Don’t Panic









[23]How Exceptional is the Pattern of Fertility Decline in Sub-Saharan Africa? Bongaarts pp. 1-4.



[24]Ibid pp. 1-2.



[25]Ibid.



[26]Ibid p.11



[27] 





[28]The Effects of Improved Survival on Fertility: A Reassessment, Cleland pp. 84-85





http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115250?loginSuccess=true&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents





[29]How Exceptional is the Pattern of Fertility Decline in Sub-Saharan Africa? Bongaarts p.11

Blog

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Is tobacco control a "best-buy" for the developing world?

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