Summary
A shallow overview of the EA & global development ecosystem.
There isn't one large EA & GD ecosystem, it is mainly individuals considering their own path to impact, with minor coordination amongst people who are part of the wider network and closer coordination amongst groups in a couple of areas (effective giving/charity entrepreneurship).
Resources
- GD & EA newsletter - updates covering a variety of topics relevant to broad global development
- GD & EA LinkedIn group - for anyone that has an interest in GD topics and can help people find each other who share that interest
- EA Forum Global Health & Development Topic/Wiki
- For global development professionals ( including think tanks/government/for-profit orgs/academia/finance) there is an EA & GD Slack. Currently there are ~200 members - you can apply using this form
- For GD professionals based in London there is also a WhatsApp group to help coordinate and arrange monthly meetups, message me for details
Global Development Ecosystems
Effective Giving
- 57 organisations, including a few that evaluate impactful giving opportunities and others that only focus on fundraising
- There is one full time organiser to help with info sharing and connections between these orgs
- GWWC support incubation of early stage effective giving initiatives
- Givewell raised ~ $600 million in 2022 (the latest date I could find figures for, and includes OP giving ~$350m)
- Other effective giving orgs in 2022 raised ~$103 million (for most of those orgs this isn't specifically for global development, although I wouldn't be surprised if 50%+ was allocated to GD)
- For 2023 the data is incomplete but so far ~$157 m was raised by non GiveWell orgs
Effective Charities
- There are several charities recommended by evaluators, most of them founded before EA existed and usually have funding outside of EA
- Charity Entrepreneurship helps found charities attempting to be good enough to get recommended status
- They also help the alumni network of charities and incubatees with connections, events and ongoing support
Foreign Aid
- $211 billion was spent on international aid in 2022 by member states of the Development Assistance Committee - a collection of 32 donor countries
- There are debates over how much actually counts as aid, and it doesn't include aid from countries outside of DAC
- Open Philanthropy spent $16m on global aid policy in 2022 and 2023. They are aiming to -
- Increase international aid budgets (and reduce cuts)
- Increase funding to especially impactful programs
- Spur cross-cutting improvements in existing programs
- Sam Anschell recently wrote about his experiences working on OP's Global Aid Policy program
- There are individuals who work in a variety of foreign aid departments who have an interest in EA ideas
- Probably Good with a post looking at careers in aid policy & advocacy
Development Finance/Impact Investing
- There are many multilateral & bilateral development banks, aiming to promote economic development, provide long term financing and stabilise the global financial system
- It was hard to find out how much money was moved in development finance (and a lot of it is loans) but it is probably in the hundreds of billions
- There are some EA interested people working in development finance but very rarely are they connected to each other or the wider EA & GD network
- Similarly with impact investing, there are a few people but often not connected
Startups/Private Sector in LMICs
- The most well known success story is Wave, a mobile service provider that allows unbanked people in Africa to access financial services. They estimated that the company saves people in Senegal over $200 million every year—or around 1% of that country's GDP
- There isn't a similar level of EA support for people in the private sector/startups compared to the charity startup network
Academic Research/Think Tanks/LMIC governments
- Similar to the private sector and development finance, there are individuals interested in EA in all these areas but either disconnected or loosely connected with others interested in EA
- Open Phil supports some of these areas via their Innovation Policy and other programs
- There are a few organisations in the progress studies area but I haven't seen much coordination outside of Twitter and Emergent Ventures conferences
- Progress Forum, Roots of Progress, Works In Progress, Emergent Ventures, Institute for Progress
- Metascience is a larger network of organisations and have a yearly conference
- Research
- Giving What We Can
- Rethink Priorities
- Charity Entrepreneurship
- Funding
- Career Advice
- Probably Good
- 80,000 Hours has some research on GD related careers and provides some career advising to people interested in these careers, but not as a main focus
- CEA
- From data at conferences I've attended, EAGs have roughly 3-6% of attendees who are development professionals and between 10-25% of attendees have an interest in global development (Roughly 16% at EAGs and more variable at EAGx events)
- The newsletters, virtual programs and EA Forum also have some development related content
- Open Philanthropy
- Open Philanthropy spent ~$400 million on global development related causes in 2023
- In 2022 OP spent ~$333 million on global development related causes
- $232m - GiveWell recommended charities
- $33m - Scientific research
- $23m - Other/meta global development (CGD, CE, Policy Cures research,GiveWell operations)
- $11m - Global public health policy
- $11m - Innovation, land use reform, immigration, economic policy
- $10m - Regranting Challenge
- $9m - Global aid policy
