This write-up is a compilation of organisations and projects aligned / adjacent to the effective altruism movement in East Asia and Southeast Asia and was written around the EAGxPhilippines conference. Some organisations, projects, and contributors also prefer to not be public and hence removed from this write-up. While this is not an exhaustive list of projects and organisations per country in the region, it is a good baseline of the progress of the effective altruism movement for this side of the globe.
Feel free to click the links to the organisations/projects themselves to dive deeper into their works.
Contributors: Saad Siddiqui; Anthony Lau; Anthony Obeyesekere; Masayuki "Moon" Nagai; Yi-Yang Chua; Elmerei Cuevas, Alethea Faye Cedaña, Jaynell Ehren Chang, Brian Tan, Nastassja "Tanya" Quijano; Dion Tan, Jia Yang Li; Saeyoung Kim; Nguyen Tran; Alvin Lau Forum Post Graphic credits to Jaynell Ehren Chang EAGxPhotos credits to CS Creatives
Dr. Gilad Feldman - Promote ‘Doing more good, doing good better’ through some of his teaching at the Psychology department at the University of Hong Kong.
Cause specific organisations/ projects
Global health and development - Generocity - a social interest group that advocates increased official development assistance (ODA) from Hong Kong. Lead by Dr. Larry Baum and Anthony Lau
Animal Welfare, Alternative Proteins & Ecosystem Growth - Good Growth Co helps organisations and funders identify strategies, products and programs to grow effectively in Asia. The research consultancy is led by Ella Wong, Jah Ying Chung and Jack Stennett.
Indonesia 🇮🇩
EA Indonesia
New community, still finding its feet and figuring out its vision/mission/strategy.
Kicked off in October 2022. First community event held in November.
An earlier attempt had been made 2-3 years earlier, but didn’t get traction.
Notionally a little over 40 community members.
9 members attending EAGxPhilippines 2023
11 volunteers currently working in various capacities across website, social media, events planning, and new member induction guide. Also another 2 non-EA volunteers who are chipping in to help.
Many members had previously looked for EA in Indonesia but had no active local group to connect with until now.
Supported by a CEA Group Support Grant. No paid community builders.
Local language website launched in April this year. Currently being redesigned.
Fairly basic local language social media strategy. Two objectives: (i) inform/educate; (ii) outreach/community growth.
Aim to hold one EA event per month. Events have included talks, speed networking, discussion groups, and community volunteering.
Strong interest in AI safety within the community: ¼ to ⅓ of the member base.
Opportunities/advantages:
Untapped/neglected market for EAs: Highly charitable society. Large population (270m). Regularly among the top of list of countries in Charity Aid Foundation’s World Giving Index.
Potentially huge audience for 80k Hours. The Indonesian government offers around 4000 scholarships for citizens to study postgraduate courses in Indonesia or overseas. Many go to top universities around the world. Recipients are grouped into cohorts which could be targeted.
Challenges:
Key-person risk: One lead organiser coordinating the community. Highly stretched. Expat and likely to leave the country in < 12 months.
Struggled to make inroads into universities. So far no university group in Indonesia. Only 2 students among our membership.
English language use is not widespread. Most online content and EA books are not accessible to Indonesians.
Please do put us in touch with any Indonesians who might be interested in EA!
Nascent community with about seven active core members, two EAIF-funded part-time community builders (Anneke & Moon) and an OP-funded team of translators
At least six members of our community will attend EAGx!
Some of our early successes
Hosted a “mini-EAGx” student conference with about 30 attendees in March 2023
Supporting the set-up of an entity for AIS-specific field building in Japan (with the broad goal to build something like an AIS hub)
Recently finished facilitating the first-ever EA intro fellowship and AGI fundamentals study group in Japanese
Launched a new EA Japan website which includes the complete EA handbook in Japanese
Challenges
Finding (potential) community builders
Navigating the post-FTX funding landscape
Overcoming the language barrier (most Japanese people don’t feel comfortable discussing complex topics in English)
Anneke and Moon are really sad to miss the retreat and would love to connect!
Please also feel free to direct any Japanese-speaking person who might be interested in EA to us!
Aims to foster a community of ambitious, careful and committed thinkers and builders focused on effectively tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems through a focus on China’s role in the world.
We currently do this by facilitating action-guiding discussions, identifying talent and community infrastructure gaps and developing new programmes to support impactful China-focused work.
2017 Peak: Taiwan had an active EA community, with regular reading groups in the past.
Decline
Loss of Momentum: Over time, the community diminished and regular meetups stopped, as leaders & some of the community builders left Taiwan for studying/working abroad.
New Beginnings in 2023
Renewed Interest: Starting 2023, new EAs have shown interest, especially in AI safety and data-based decision-making.
EAGxPhilippines Visit: A recent visit to EAGxPhilippines, ignited our inspiration during the engagement with all East and Southeast Asian EA communities, led us to the idea of future plans.
Future Plans
Student Organisations: Considering starting groups like EA NTU.
Reviving Activities: Plans to restart reading/study groups.
Translation Work: Aiming to translate EA documents to empower the Mandarin community.
Unique Position
Irreplaceable Global Asset: Taiwan holds a unique, irreplaceable position in the Mandarin community, given China's large population and the government's cautious stance on EA-related community.
Thailand 🇹🇭
No official group but there are interested individuals. You may contact Vorathep at vorathep112 at gmail dot com for this.
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
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Thanks a lot for this carefully compiled information! May all sentient beings benefit from the actions that you folks are organizing there!