Million dollar donation: penny for your thoughts?

My preference within this genre would be for something with more leverage and greater expected impact at the expense of local linearity. I'd especially call out the Center for Global Development, which has a history of policy wins that I think justify its budget many times over, and Target Malaria for work getting gene drives deployed to eliminate vector-borne diseases such as malaria. I'd prefer one dollar to these over multiple dollars to AMF, or the recommendations in the report.

Hello!

While I appreciate the insights in the report, I believe that you have, too soon, ruled out considering organizations that work to support people in launching small and medium enterprises that help create jobs for low income individuals and subsequently reduce poverty.

The global Hand in Hand network is a partnership of NGOs who are united by a shared commitment to poverty alleviation through women’s economic empowerment and micro-enterprise development. Launched in 2003 in southern India, their work has trained over 3 million people – 90 percent women – and supported the creation of over 2.9 million enterprises, improving the lives of over 16 million people through strengthened incomes.

They have worked in East Africa since 2010, launching in Nairobi, and expanded into Tanzania in 2018. They also had a three-year joint program in Rwanda with CARE, which concluded  in 2016.

The donors you are working with are interested in evidence of impact – and Hand in Hand’s work in Eastern Africa has been consistently validated by independent evaluations. The structures, enterprises, and gains to knowledge and confidence made their projects are sustained far longer than the projects themselves. To this end, I believe they are well worth your consideration for presenting recommendations of worthy NGOs supporting poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa.

1. A 2016 review of a project in Kenya funded by the Swedish government – which created 14,000 jobs – found “the effect of the project in reducing the number of people living below Ksh 3,000 (US $30) has been phenomenal”, with a reduction from 56 percent of members below this poverty level, to only 15 percent. At the same time, the proportion of members earning US $100 or more each month jumped from nine to 27 percent, with retail and services resulting in average monthly sales of US $217 and $191 respectively.

You can download the full report here: http://www.handinhandinternational.org/hand-in-hand-a-centre-of-excellence-says-review/

2. As part of an ongoing partnership with Visa Inc. in Kenya, the firm 60 Decibals undertook a rapid response survey polling 170 past project members two years after their project’s closed. Some relevant findings are that:

- Hand in Hand’s training is useful. 95 percent of respondents were still using it in their business.

- Hand in Hand’s training improves people’s lives. 95 percent saw improvements in their quality of life after completing our training. Bigger incomes were the main reason why.

- Hand in Hand goes where other NGOs don’t. 92 percent of respondents said there was no alternative to Hand in Hand where they lived.

- Given a choice, they prefer Hand in Hand. Among respondents who had an alternative, 85 percent said Hand in Hand was better.

You can download the full report here: http://www.handinhandinternational.org/95-of-hand-in-hand-members-report-improved-quality-of-life/

3. Again in Kenya, a midline report in a project funded by IKEA Foundation found poverty had been “drastically reduced” for project members at halfway point, with the widespread use of climate resilient practices being a driving factor.

You can download the full report here: http://www.handinhandinternational.org/poverty-drastically-reduced-for-hand-in-hand-members-report/

4. In Rwanda, those groups receiving training from Hand in Hand earned an average 65 percent higher profit than comparison groups.

You can download the full report here: http://www.handinhandinternational.org/10-5-million-opportunities-leveraging-savings-groups-with-business-training-from-hand-in-hand/”

I am happy to provide further details upon request and look forward to connecting further.

Kayuri Bhimani, Friends of Hand in Hand US Office

Hi! Writing as a Research Advisor at Founders Pledge and formerly staff at J-PAL. I really enjoyed reading this report and was very impressed by the detail, clarity, and brevity (30 pages isn't short, of course, but this could've been much wordier - it's very to-the-point). Some specific things I found particularly exciting:

(1) The purpose of this report and the goals/values of the donors were made very clear at the beginning and referenced throughout the document. This is surprisingly easy to leave out, especially when writing for a familiar audience (like Effective Altruists) whom we may expect to have identical worldviews to our own.

(2) It was great to see your rationale for selecting your top interventions, as well as the reasons you chose not to select others from Table 1. It helped provide a complete picture of how and why you arrived at your conclusions.

(3) It was interesting (with no positive nor negative connotation - just truly interesting!) to see the GiveWell-evaluated health interventions included in the category of early childhood development. I've never seen them framed in that way, but it made sense to me while reading.

Other organizations you could consider looking into:

(1) BOMA Project, Trickle Up, and BRAC all implement the Graduation approach on the African continent.

(1a) BRAC is, of course, the creator of the approach and a very impressive and evidence-focused organization. I think it would be worth getting in touch with BRAC to see if donors of this size could earmark support to the Ultra-Poor Graduation Program in Uganda.

(1b) BOMA Project implements a version of the Graduation approach in a few countries, with most of its work in Kenya. I don't know them well, but they're often speakers at conferences with sessions on the Graduation approach and related social protection programs.

(1c) Trickle Up also implements the Graduation approach on the African continent and elsewhere. I have a positive impression of them from a few meetings with their M&E team, but don't have deep knowledge about their programs so can't recommend for or against.

(2) BRAC's Empowerment and Livelihoods for Adolescents program is also something that might be of interest. It's been studied with RCTs in Uganda and Sierra Leone (the latter study is really interesting as it took place during the Ebola outbreak) and found to have positive results on income and education levels. I've never seen a cost-effectiveness analysis, but the SL RCT notes that the program "has proved to be scalable and cost-effective across countries" (p. 11).

(3) J-PAL's Innovation in Government Initiative (IGI). I'd guess this was left out because it fits into the "evidence-based policy" category, but the competitive nature of the fund means that the projects it supports are more like TaRL Africa's work (specific, discrete technical assistance to meet policymaker demand) than generic advocacy. IGI is the recommended charity from Founders Pledge's report on evidence-based policy, and fits the "transformative" criterion in a slightly different way - enabling the transformation of entire government programs that are designed to improve lives.

A few notes and questions I had while reading:

(1) Did you assess try to assess organizations’ track record/strength when making these recommendations? From my experience, both TaRL Africa and Village Enterprise are exceptionally strong, evidence-based organizations with strong leadership and implementation on the ground. It could strengthen your recommendation to include a note about their commitment to evidence use and generation, local partnerships, etc.

(2) For Village Enterprise in particular, it would be good to mention the Sedlmayr, Shah, and Sulaiman (2018) study that directly compared VE's program with a cost-equivalent cash transfer in Uganda. This can help bolster your reasoning for selecting them over GiveDirectly (although the cash only results were really noisy and hard to interpret - I hope an updated paper will be released sometime soon).

(3) I was confused about your cost-effectiveness estimates for TaRL until I looked at the linked spreadsheet. The intervention can vary along a number of axes, and both the costs and impacts will vary based on the local context and population served, so I wasn't sure what a cost-effectiveness estimate for the TaRL approach meant. I see from the spreadsheet that your cost estimates came from the studies with Pratham in India - I think it would help to clarify that in the document itself.

Epilogue: I am happy to report that the donors have decided today to donate 1 million dollars (CAD) over the next five years to support Teaching at the Right Level, Africa. This initiative is helping to change education systems in African countries so that students in primary school can learn to read, write and count (which is sadly not the case right now, for the most part). Since writing my report, Teaching at the Right Level, Africa has also been reviewed and recommended by Founders Pledge. 

I thank all of you for your thoughts and comments and am very excited to have been able to contribute to this :)

Thanks for your work on this. One charity to consider is Raising Voices, which I think fits their mandate exceptionally well (and which I also think should be considered by the wider EA community).

Full disclosure: I'm a former employee of Raising Voices.

RV has a program to prevent violence against children in schools. It is well-evidenced - there are now more than 25 peer-reviewed papers, including RCTs and cost-effectiveness evaluations, available on their VAC prevention program. They are based in Uganda, and their theory of change explicitly focuses on empowerment. They currently reach 750 schools across Uganda, and are currently scaling up across the country. Their work also has the potential for wider impact, since they lead several global coalitions. This sum would be significant in the context of their annual budget. Preventing violence in schools is good in itself, but there is good evidence that it relates to positive physical health, mental health, educational and economic outcomes.

Nice work! This seems like a pretty great overview of our current understanding of a whole range of international development interventions, at least on the micro end of the spectrum. Useful not just for your donors, but the community as a whole.

Two quick points. First, in your appendix you write that it would be interesting to see a rigorous evaluation of Jeff Sachs' Millenium Village Project. DFID did fund a big evaluation of that project which returned pretty negative results. Marginal Revolution discusses that here, plus there's a paper by Gelman et al. cited at the end of the MR post.

Second, I do think there's a bit of tension between the part where you write "the donors are comfortable with impact within the next 1 to 20 years or so, but not keen on options like R&D and policy advocacy which may or may not have an impact at all" and your recommendation of TaRL. As you note, it's completely possible that J-PAL's work to scale up TaRL across Sub Saharan African will fail. The line between policy advocacy and policymaking support is pretty blurry.

I don't want to discourage you from recommending TaRL because I think it's great! And of course you can't evalute everything. But I'd be interested in your thinking about what differentiates TaRL advocacy from advocacy for better health or macro policies, which you've largely excluded.

Because you're recommending Village Enterprise, I'd also flag TechnoServe, which runs similar programs and is the top-rated poverty alleviation charity by ImpactMatters. It's worth noting that ImpactMatters only evaluated (I believe) TechnoServe's Impulsa Tu Empresa program, which operates exclusively in Latin America, but the organization runs analogous programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Obviously, those might not be similarly cost-effective, but a prima facie basis for making that assumption (rather than the opposite, for instance) isn't obvious to me.

Looks good from a quick read-through.

To make an obvious point, as relevant information (including about new charities/causes) will presumably improve a lot over the next 5 years, there seems a case for updating your recommendation annually rather than the donors committing upfront to donating 5 years' worth to particular charities (if that was the idea).

Depending to some extent on whether a 5-year commitment is essential for the programmes being donated to. If it is, a middle way might be to commit upfront to donating for 5 years subject to the programmes achieving XYZ goals, to be independently assessed each year.

Another obvious point (which you mention of course): the extremely wide range of the TaRL and salt iodization cost-effectiveness figures, from far below 1 (Founders Pledge estimate) to far above, would give me concerns as a donor that these are poorly understood interventions.