Effective altruism is built on the simple but unsettling idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the most good one can. In this course you will examine this idea's philosophical underpinnings; meet remarkable people who have restructured their lives in accordance with it; and think about how effective altruism can be put into practice in your own life.
Evaluating Oxfam's Work
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From the course by Princeton University
Effective Altruism
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From the lesson
Poverty and Affluence, Part 1
What obligations do the affluent have towards those who live in extreme poverty? In this week, we look at one distinct argument based on consequentialist ethics, and also begin the discussion of the effectiveness of aid programs. This week also includes a conversation with Raymond Offenheiser.
Meet the Instructors
Peter SingerIra W. Decamp Professor of Bioethics
University Center for Human Values
[BLANK AUDIO] You
mentioned the discussion about the effectiveness of particular projects and
I wanted to ask a little bit about Oxfam's evaluation and monitoring.
We're going to be talking in this course with people from
GiveWell who've been evaluating particular charities.
And Oxfam is not one of GiveWell's recommended top charities.
I know you've had some contact with them, some discussion with them, so
I wanted to give you a chance to say what you think of the way they evaluate and
what you think you're able to do in terms of evaluation.
How you, how you would try to demonstrate to somebody that,
even if GiveWell has not recommended you as one of their top charities,
you would still see what you're doing as being highly effective.
>> Well the first thing I'd say is I think we're in a very interesting moment in this
entire field of, of of philanthropy and
development both domestically and internationally.
Because I think what's,
one of the things that's going on is we're in the midst of what I guess I'd call an,
an accountability revolution.
In which organizations, not for profits, both you know, from donor countries as
well as in, in many of the countries where we work are being challenged to
demonstrate the impact of the work that they do in meaningful ways.
And I think that's a good thing.
And I think the challenge to organizations, however,
is to now invest in delivering answers to many of those tough questions.
One of the problems in our sector has been, historically,
we've been under-invested in that, that, in that function.
And even our donors have, have actually under-invested in that function,
historically.
So, while they demand the outcome, they don't necessarily invest it,
invest in enabling it to happen.
Although, I think that's probably changing as we go forward.
But in our particular case we, we embrace the accountability revolution with
the idea that we did not want to be simply compliant.
But we wanted to be an industry leader.
And we've introduced recognizing that we're,
we're implementing I guess what you might call a somewhat unique approach.
As you said at the beginning, a rights-based approach to development.
An approach which for our long term development programs,
we're establishing baselines, we're doing mid-course evaluations,
we're doing annual impact reviews.
And then every pro, every pro, project is embedded in a program, and
we're doing if you will, summary program reviews for multi year pro,
programs that we're implementing over time.
In our humanitarian work, which is very fast moving and
requires a different kind of an approach1 it's hard to establish a baseline
because of the, you know, you, you're going into a very chaotic situation.
Although, a lot of the baseline is about the mortality rates that may be
occurring in a particular setting that you're trying to address and or mitigate.
In those cases we do real-time evaluations on the ground that actually enable us
to make course corrections in the kind of services we're providing
in humanitarian environments.
And then again, we're doing in-depth reviews at the end of these events to
determine, did we respond fast enough, did we meet the global standards for
good performance are the particular things we're learning from these events that
actually need to be incorporated into our work planning for the future.
One example recently is our response to Ebola.
This response to pandemics is not something that not for
profits have historically done in the humanitarian space and Ebola presented us
with enormous challenges where the kinds of things that we would historically do in
a refugee camp did not apply to kind of a highly dispersed pandemic outbreak.
And the normal kinds of things we would do in a public health delivery system of
providing water and sanitation to mitigate disease outbreaks did not apply or
they were important but not in the same way that they would be in a refugee camp.
What we found ourselves doing was actually patient identification.
And having to organize teams to go out and do patient identification.
Something that was, we hadn't imagined ourselves doing.
So this, is, is caused us to actually in our evaluative process to ask ourselves,
are we prepared for, for pandemic outbreaks in the future?
And we think they actually could be part of our future in today's world.
And so we've incorporated that as a as a new learning initiative within
the humanitarian unit, as a consequence of the value to work we've done.
The toughest part of our work is actually evaluating our advocacy work and
our campaigns work which, you know, I've talked about earlier in the conversation.
And one of the things that I think groups like GiveWell have found challenging
in that area is it doesn't lend itself to traditional
mathematical or quantitative evaluative techniques.
In many ways, it's an approach in which you have a, maybe a legislative target or
a policy change target or an approach to a corporation where you're trying to change
behaviors and corporate business practices.
And there is a critical path you have to follow that has a whole set of
intermediate victories, that some of which you can identify and some of which may
be difficult to identify, but you achieve them along the way.
And you have to constantly make course corrections and so planning that
kind of work and establishing base lines are a lot tougher and different.
Unless mathematically less susceptible to mathematical calculation,
and the, the traditional service delivery of where we might be vaccinating children,
or we might be, you know building a school and
trying to get, you know educational attendance up.
>> Right, so there the, the criteria and I guess you can do really,
even randomized trials.
You do this in some villages and not others and
you see what the differences are, I think it's easy to understand that
the advocacy work is not going to be susceptible to that kind of testing.
But still somewhere in the organization and presumably the box stops with you
decisions have to be made in terms of budget.
How much of your budget do you decide to allocate to advocacy?
How much to humanitarian relief work and how much to
other kinds of traditional, more traditional development like as you
mentioned helping families to grow rice better or something of that sort.
So I'm, I'm curious as to how that decision actually gets
made if these things are all rather different.
As you say, some of them you can get quite good comparisons of,
of what the difference you make here is,
and what the benefits are at a certain cost, others you can't.
What, what, can you say anything about that process of.
>> Yeah, well, basically Oxfam has three basic areas of activities.
One, is our humanitarian response capability, the other is our long-term
development work, and the third is our advocacy and campaigning work.
And in the humanitarian work, basically our criteria for
that is we need to have a basic set of core competencies and
deployable staff for humanitarian emergencies.
And so, and we figured out what we need to contribute to
the work of our global confederation in that particular area,
and we know what that core is and so we established the budge,
budget based on that, in knowing what that core set of competencies is, is.
Now what happens in humanitarian emergencies when the emergencies occur,
we will get large tranches of money coming in to support the emergency.
We would hire new staff.
We would deploy people to the field.
And hire a local staff in the field to build out a large team.
In responding to a major emergency, so.
>> So you're actually growing your own budget by growing your
revenue because you're responding.
>> Right. >> And you're seen to be responding to
this particular emergency.
>> So, so in Haiti we might have 700 staff, but we might only have 25 or
30 expatriate experts, and the rest are all going to be Haitians.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Who are, you know, who, who are, you know,
some of whom would be specialists in public health.
And other areas and
then we would train other people in some of the subset issues that we to,
that we need to address in managing large refugee camp settlements or in
dealing with water and sanitation issues at very, very local or a micro level.
And we're accustomed to doing that in all sorts of settings all over the world so
in some sense this is an area that expands and contracts based on, on need and
availability of funding.
The area where we have to be careful is in the work that we do at the country level,
where we set, where we're developing new programs, and
we're actually trying to keep a sufficient amount of money of,
that we get from donors on a restricted basis for developing the kinds of programs
we've been talking about, let say, a weather index insurance program.
And let's say, Ethiopia might have, you know, a foundation supporting it.
Might have a major corporation like Swiss Re supporting it and
we would put in some unrestricted money and we would get that program going and
support it on a multi year basis.
And we'd have to make commitments that, that program based on the evaluations that
we've done, actually merits ongoing support going forward.
Some sense, we're social investor in the sense that we've gotta, we've gotta test
new ideas and if they're proving to be successful, continue to support them
modestly as we're doing proof of case and then look for more money for expansion.
But, in many cases, in that long-term development work we're assuming we're not
going to do the scale-up so just to take that weather index insurance program
we've taken that to the point where we've got proof of case in Ethiopia.
We've partnered with the World Food Program now, and
they're taking it to other areas of Ethiopia.
But they're also taking it to Mali and Senegal, and perhaps Zambia and Malawi
in the future in which we'll be providing a little bit of the technical support for
the implementation of it, but they're going to do the scale up.
So, we're not presuming that we're going to be the the big service provider
on the scale-up portion of that initiative.
So, that enables us to be very strategic in the way we're putting our money towards
those issues without necessarily assuming we need large tranches of money for
the scale-up.
In the advocacy area, I think we're presuming that it's a complement to our
field-based work, so we never imagined it being something that would dwarf our
long-term development work and on average it's been, probably a quarter,
in terms of scale of our, you know, our overall development work overseas.
And that goes toward our presence in Washington, D.C.
as a, as a, policy presence to the kind of, research, policy research,
we need to do to back our Ideas and to building a national constituency here in
the United States of people who actually are interested in international
development and, and the policy issues that we represent.
>> Okay.
Well I think I've covered the issues that were on my mind,
and I wonder whether in closing there's anything that you want to say to
people who are taking this course and are thinking about altruism and
acting altruistically and being effective with regard to that.
Is, is there, are there any final thoughts you'd like to leave them with?
>> Well, I think maybe I'll, I'll go back to where I started,
which I think this, this question of, you know, what is poverty is,
is something that's been debated for a very, very long time and I think.
You know, I would challenge maybe your viewers to actually think a little bit
about this dichotomy between the idea of poverty as the absence of,
of public goods and our need to address those.
And there is a place for
altruism and there is a place for addressing immediate needs.
But I challenge people to actually think a little bit more about root causes.
And the fact that maybe we can address the poverty problem in
a very challenging way if we're thinking about poverty as social exclusion.
And thinking about what are those barriers that limit the ability of poor people to
actually work their way out of of their poverty circumstance.
And, when you begin to look at poverty in those terms,
you begin to see what the barriers are, what the obstacles are.
And what kinds of changes, in terms of policy and
practice of institutions, are needed to actually get at root causes.
And, it's a different path to an outcome that maybe yield,
may yield more benefit for more people than
the limited projects that we often times think of as the best quality work.
Those who were satisfying, they were gratifying their needed but
maybe it's time for us to look at root causes and
think about the poverty challenge in a somewhat different way.
>> Then we have to think about how we can change those root causes of course.
>> Exactly.
>> All right.
Okay, thanks very much for talking with us, Ray.
>> Thank you Peter, it's been a pleasure.
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