I am drawing from my 3+ years of experience in actively contributing to Effective Altruism Nigeria community building, I think that community building requires adapting to local context, measuring success by whether people become more agentic and take concrete actions rather than by attendance numbers, and investing in long-term capacity toward a community that can eventually sustain and lead itself.
The biggest challenges I've observed are measuring outcomes since impact often surfaces much more later most times, and funding limitations. To close these gaps, I propose continued capacity building programs for community builders, more region based talent and project incubators to lower entry barriers for global south participants and how EA co-working spaces could reduce dependence on external funding if they are run well.
Note: This post is mainly based on my opinions, is meant to offer additional perspective to anyone who is working in a similar context. This is also written independently of EA Nigeria.
Nigeria already has a number of organisations working on important problems, including global health, poverty reduction and farmed animal welfare. This creates opportunities for community members to contribute, whether by joining existing high-impact organisations, starting new projects, pursuing social entrepreneurship, or bringing an impact-oriented approach to their existing careers.
So while we broadly cover all top EA cause areas in our programs, we place greater emphasis on those that are most locally relevant, such as farmed animal welfare, global health and development, and biosecurity. And I think that one of the best ways for Africans to get involved in cause areas that haven't yet taken root here such as AI Safety is to get into training and capacity-building programs, most of which are run in regions where this work is more advanced. I expand on this in my third point.
The success of a community should not be measured primarily by its size. It is easy to focus on the number of people attending events, joining fellowships, or engaging with online content, but these numbers do not necessarily tell us whether the community is creating a meaningful impact. I am more interested in whether people are becoming more agentic, informed, and engaged, and whether they are taking action based on their engagement. This could mean someone moving into a high-impact career, starting a project, contributing to research, joining an organisation working on an important cause, getting into capacity building programs, or simply becoming more intentional about how they use their time and resources. I therefore see community building as a tool and a space that helps people move from awareness to engagement and to action.
This is closely tied to the fact that people become significantly more effective when they are connected to the right networks. One of the roles of EA Nigeria is to bring together people who are thinking carefully or curious about some of the world's most pressing problems and connect them with resources and serve as a network that can help them take action. Someone may have the motivation to work on a problem but lack the skills, another person may have the skills but lack knowledge of the opportunity, while someone else may have the resources or connections needed to make a project possible. Bringing these people together can create opportunities that would not have existed otherwise. This makes community building more than organising events; it is about creating an ecosystem where people, resources, and opportunities can connect and make an impact.
I think that capacity building can be a form of a long-term impact. Some cause areas, such as global health and animal welfare, now have organisations, policies, funding, and government engagement that make it easier for people to work on them. This is partly the result of years of advocacy, awareness building, and institutional development. We cannot necessarily say the same about global catastrophic related causes such as AI safety, nuclear security, climate change where much of the work is still focused on stakeholders engagement, and building the talent pipeline all of which seem to be the longer route to impact because there are not many organisations working on this effectively and developed talents may not find organisations to work in or projects to contribute to locally unless they start their own project that would require funding and more talent. I understand that community building does not always produce immediate results, sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is create the conditions for future impact by developing people's skills, exposing them to important ideas, connecting them to opportunities, and helping them become capable contributors.
Ultimately, I think that the goal of community building should be to create a community that can sustain and lead itself. I would consider a strong EA community to be one that is financially sustainable, has leaders across different backgrounds and levels of experience, and has members actively contributing across areas such as business, government, academia, philanthropy, and civil society. It would have people working on different cause areas, starting projects, funding important work, and creating institutions that can continue beyond the efforts of the community builders.
I think EA Nigeria is still at an early stage of this journey. We are still learning what works well within the Nigerian and African context, but over time we have seen more members become more engaged with EA ideas, take on high-impact roles, start projects, and participate more actively in the global EA community. For me, the long-term measure of success is not whether the organising team can continue to run events, but whether we can build a community that eventually has the people, leadership, and resources to sustain itself, and make an impact beyond the community builders who started it.
We are constantly trying to understand what growth means for our community and how to measure outcomes. I am not sure what the actual measurement of growth should be or if it is the same for communities in other regions (not sure if it’s the same). Instead, the focus should be more on shared outcomes, while also learning from the different routes that lead to these outcomes.
Two main outcomes at the end of the funnel that I think every community builder and funder wants to see are the number of people getting hired in high-impact organisations, and the number of people starting impactful projects.
The other metrics usually measure progress rather than definite outcomes, for example, someone engaging more with EA content; someone who completes an intro fellowship and is now doing an in-depth fellowship.
Most times, these outcomes are not visible immediately after program completion. Right after a program, we can only get a sense of how much value attendees got from it and what actions they intend to take afterwards. We've learned to send a follow-up survey after 3-6 months, but by that point most people don't fill it out, so it's hard to get a real sense of how many have actually taken action based on their last engagement.
What has usually worked for me is intentionally chatting with community members to find out what progress they've made. That way, I've been able to learn about a few people who went on to volunteer, intern, or work in high-impact organisations, and others who got grants for their projects. Sometimes community members also share opportunities they've gotten in our WhatsApp and Slack groups out of excitement, some of them reach out to us organisers to let us know when they've made significant progress out of courtesy probably because we were the ones who shared the opportunity with them in the first place.
Most community building activities require funding, including outreach, events, fellowship programs, and community support programs, among others. Sometimes I wonder if EA groups can survive without funding, especially national groups which are usually larger and need more resources to carry out their activities.
With more funding, I think some organisers could transition into community building full time, spending more time providing capacity support and trying to understand the community more broadly. This could lead to better outcomes.
I think there would be a lot of value in organising capacity building programs for community builders, beyond simply having a good number of resources and guides, such as the one from EA Groups Resource Centre, most especially for city and national EA group organisers who have members across different demographics within their groups.
It's not enough to just attend conferences and coordinate ourselves in regional groups. CEA, as a steward of the community, could occasionally organise workshops for people doing EA meta work. This could further deepen their learning, help them think more carefully about their community's growth, and increase their confidence.
I acknowledge the impact CEA's Groups team is having through the Organiser Support Program (OSP) in supporting new and existing community builders with resources and mentorship. I am making a case for the long term here.
I am continuously inspired by the work organisations like AIM, AAA,and ILINA are doing in talent and project incubation, and I think we need more of these kinds of organisations operating in the global south, where there's a huge gap talent. EA groups are able to provide fiscal sponsorship for emerging projects and career advice, but may not have the capacity to directly incubate projects.
I imagine that if we had more of these kinds of organisations operating within our region, they would have more context, the barrier to entry for participants would be lower, and the competition less, since participants wouldn't be competing against everyone from other parts of the world. This could accelerate the path to impact in developing countries. Imagine an incubation program for social entrepreneurs who are then able to sell their products, scale their businesses, and donate a percentage of their income to effective charities. After all, some of the biggest donors in the philanthropic space are entrepreneurs.
EA groups should consider having a co-working space that could serve multiple purposes: a space to promote EA, a venue for events, office space for organisations working to solve pressing global problems, and ultimately, a source of revenue, hence, reducing dependence on external funding if they are run well and generate profit, this could fund other programs, pay for organisers’ time, provide small grants for upcoming projects.
This has high potential to work in Abuja, Nigeria, where there are a number of high impact organisations that come to Abuja to get some work done who may need an office space.
