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Krisztina Csortea

Putting the sexy into sanitation 

Welcome to the inaugural post in our series bringing you news items and current affairs stories related to international development and charitable giving. In the first post, I will discuss the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinventing the Toilet Challenge.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has recently announced the winner and runners up in its 

. The Foundation has already invested approximately $3.2 million in the project and will further fund the testing of some of the prototypes entered into the competition. The success of the challenge demonstrates the usefulness of innovative methods in distributing funding: in this case the use of a competition to spur research and development. Furthermore the competition has succeeded in raising the public profile of a significant but often neglected development problem as it has garnered significant media attention. (See, for example, this 

 published on the BBC News website today.)

The UN estimates that there are about 2.5 billion people living without access to basic sanitation facilities. Preventable diseases linked to inadequate sanitation may cause the death of 1.5 million children annually, from conditions such as diarrhoea. Problems related to sanitation also have high attendant economic costs. For example, girls are often not sent to school if the building lacks sanitary facilities. The Foundation estimates that every $1 dollar invested in improving sanitation would produce a $9 return. Despite the serious human and economic costs of bad or non-existent sanitation the UN admits that the Millennium Development Goal for sanitation will probably not be met.

The goal of the challenge was to find sustainable solutions to sanitation that local communities would and could adopt. The most common method of sanitation, the flushing toilet unfortunately doesn't fit the bill. Flush toilets use up wasteful quantities of water and also require a sophisticated sewage system to function well. This makes them both unsustainable and very expensive. The flush toilet is clearly not a good solution in areas suffering from water shortage and without reliable infrastructure. Entrants to the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge had to come up with solutions which, unlike the flush toilet, are cheap, sustainable and easy to implement.

The winning toilet was developed by the California Institute of Technology. It is powered by solar energy and treats waste so that the end products are useful. It produces chlorine, a disinfectant, hydrogen which can be used for cooking and fertiliser. The runner up was designed by researchers at Loughborough University. It uses a chemical process to power itself and treat waste. In third place, the team from the University of Toronto created a toilet that powers itself and sanitises waste by using sand.

At the moment, the prototypes are quite expensive to make. But all three have the potential, when mass produced, to provide a cheap method of alleviating a problem blighting the lives of billions.

Simon Jenkins

Giving to Charity – A Pain in the Eye?

Giving What We Can put me in hospital. I was only a few steps from the postbox after posting my signed pledge back to GWWC. I’d been toying with the idea of becoming a member for something like a year, during which time I’d been agonising over a Masters dissertation on the very topic of how far our obligations to those in the developing world stretch. So after all this time, I was pleased with myself for having finally mustered up the courage to sign the pledge. I had felt a certain gravity and importance in the action of signing it and closing the envelope. I had gone to the letterbox, presumably with some kind of spring in my step, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d let out a resounding “ahhh” as I posted the letter into the slot.

But I can’t quite remember now, because a few seconds later I was stumbling around in pain. I was marching down the hill from the letterbox when some debris flew from a nearby building site and caught me in the eye. I’ve made this sound more serious than it is – whatever it was was tiny and there was no permanent damage. At any rate, I found myself in A&E that evening.

I can only speak for myself, but the juxtaposition of these two significant events made it feel natural to consider whether there was a connection between them. It felt like the universe was putting me in my place for being too self-satisfied about my increase in charitable giving. Or maybe it was trying to balance out the suffering that I’d averted.

Of course, the real answer is that it was just a coincidence. Really I don’t believe the universe works like that, and I only entertain these karmic ideas for fun. (There isn’t much to do in A&E, and you have to think about 

It was at this point, or somewhere thereabouts, that I realised how awful I was being. Sure, my eye hurt. Rather a lot. But there I was, sitting in a huge hospital, waiting for free (I’m a tax-dodging student) healthcare from some professionals who, from a global perspective at least, were top of their game. My suffering (and that even seems like too strong a word for it) was miniscule compared to everything else that goes on in the world.

This idea that we in the developed world are all so lucky and privileged and so on is of course not new. It’s a downright cliché that we’ve all heard millions of times, starting from when we were reminded of the “starving children in Africa” by our irate parents as they tried to get us to eat whatever wittles they’d put in front of us. You may even have rolled your eyes at my use of this cliché. But I suggest you roll them back. Yes, we’ve all heard thousands of times how minor all the bad things that happen to us are compared to the plight of billions the world over. But the very fact that this concept has become a cliché is absolutely appalling. My own mother (sorry ma) changes the channel whenever a charitable appeal comes on the telly because she finds them boring. 

. Imagine if you were starving to death (another cliché I suppose) and somebody came upon you, only to comment that your misery was, to them, merely yawn-inducing. “Seen it before, mate. Try something new”. You’d be absolutely aghast, if you weren’t too busy suffering to pay them any attention.

We’d do well to remind ourselves that, to the people who are affected, the situation is far from cliché. When I was growing up, it was just one of those facts of life that there were loads of people dying all around the world. I don’t think I felt powerless, I just don’t think it occurred to me to do anything about it. Now it has, and the hospital incident has descended into nothing more than a fun (maybe) story and a catchy (possibly) opening line for a blog entry. The eye pain is long gone. But the good feeling remains.

how we can help those living in poverty here.►

Ben Hoskin

Problems with “Overhead Costs” as a metric

This blog aims (among other things) to explain the methods we employ in our research at Giving What We Can. In that spirit, we’d like to start by explaining an important way in which we differ from many charity evaluators.

, there are also persistent myths about how to evaluate charities. One of the most prevalent, and most damaging, of these is that we should just look at the amount the charity spends on advertising, or salaries, or broader administration in order to decide which charities to donate to – supporting those which spend most of their revenue directly on the programs they operate.

if we assume the program has a certain value

, every dollar spent on admin is indeed a dollar not spent on the program. But the value of programs varies dramatically, and dollars not spent directly on programs can be used to improve the program, or raise even more money: we need to take these into account.

thousands of times more effective than others.

 If one charity A spends slightly more on administration than charity B, but operates a program that's ten times as effective, then overall it will still be much more effective. As overall effectiveness is what we care about, it would be misleading to focus on overhead costs.

The variance in charity effectiveness means there's great room for improvement. Improving the efficiency of its operations means a charity can achieve much more - but this requires spending money on gathering data, analysing it, producing a new strategy and implementing it. This is extremely beneficial, so it doesn't make sense to punish the charity for it - and yet that's exactly what the 'overhead' metric does.

Secondly, money raising is a valuable activity! If my $100 donation funds a media campaign that raises $200, then I've helped twice as many people as if my money was spent directly. As advertising generally raises more money than it costs, it's no bad thing for a charity to be undertaking. Obviously 

 of the money has to be spent on the program, but as long as investments in advertising is yielding more money to spend on interventions, it's a very good thing.

So while there is a grain of truth to the anti-administration argument, there are powerful considerations on the other side. The solution is to look at an overall metric, like 

. Since ultimately we want to help as many people as possible, and only care about the charities as a means to this end, it makes sense to look at QALYs instead. QALYs/dollar takes into account both the internal structure of the charity, their relationship with donors 

 the impact their intervention has. It allows us to avoid the messy question of judging the organisational structure of charities, and focus instead on 

William MacAskill

Welcome to the Giving What We Can Blog

It’s my great pleasure to write the inaugural blog post on our 

This blog will allow those involved with Giving What We Can to communicate more freely with the rest of the world. In the coming months, we’ll have plenty to tell you about. We’ll use this blog as a means to explain some of the core ideas surrounding our approach to giving, and our approach to assessing which charities to give to — ideas like ‘QALYs,’ ‘fungibility’ or ‘precommitment’. We’ll update you all about our current thinking in the course of our research into charity cost-effectiveness, and start discussions on issues related to the methodology of ascertaining cost-effectiveness. We’ll discuss important issues in developing world current affairs. And we’ll share stories about our members, our chapters, and the general goings-on within the community that has formed around Giving What We Can.

In other news, Giving What We Can has recently matured as an organisation, and now has three paid staff who form the core Giving What We Can team. The new updated website would not have been possible without them, and it’s my pleasure to briefly introduce them:

Michelle Hutchinson is the new Executive Director. Michelle has been a long-term volunteer, and is just finishing up her PhD in moral philosophy from Oxford University.

Tom Ash is the new Director of Operations. Tom gained his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Cambridge and his research Master’s from Oxford, after which he worked for the not-for-profit magazines 

Robert Wiblin is the new Director of Research. Rob graduated with Honours in economics and genetics from Australia National University, and has worked for the Australian Treasury and the 

Toby Ord will remain as President of Giving What We Can, and I as Vice-President. And, of course, we will continue to be indebted to the small army of dedicated volunteers who have done such an enormous amount to help grow Giving What We Can.