I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
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Epistemic status: Wrote this pretty fast, probably ~70% confident some version of the thesis claim is true, would welcome being proven demonstrably wrong.
Context: I’m a grantmaker focused on alt-protein and am fairly well-connected/moderately in the loop of what animal welfare grantmakers are doing.
This post was significantly inspired by “...
Hello! I have read that sometimes infrastructure is built but goes unused because it's easier to raise money to build than it is to raise money to maintain. If this is a real problem, I thought maybe it would make sense to offer micro-endowments, the idea being that solving a problem in perpetuity would raise the emotional stakes back to being on par with new construction.
My main questions are: 1) Is this a real problem? and 2) Do you know of any case where maintenance costs are low enough that a micro-endoment would be on par with initial cost (maybe a yearly maintenance cost of 1/25th of installation cost)?
Thank you for any and all feedback!