I wanted to share a small but important challenge I've encountered as a student engaging with Effective Altruism from a lower-income country (Nigeria), and invite thoughts or suggestions from the community.
Recently, I tried to make a one-time donation to one of the EA-aligned charities listed on the Giving What We Can platform. However, I discovered that I could not donate an amount less than $5.
While this might seem like a minor limit for many, for someone like me — a student without a steady income or job, $5 is a significant amount.
To provide some context:
According to Numbeo, the average monthly income of a Nigerian worker is around $130–$150, and students often rely on even less — sometimes just $20–$50 per month for all expenses. For many students here, having $5 "lying around" isn't common at all; it could represent a week's worth of meals or transportation.
I personally want to make small, one-time donations whenever I can, rather than commit to a recurring pledge like the 10% Giving What We Can pledge, which isn't feasible for me right now. I also want to encourage members of my local EA group, who are in similar financial situations, to practice giving through small but meaningful donations.
In light of this, I would like to:
* Recommend that Giving What We Can (and similar platforms) consider allowing smaller minimum donation amounts to make giving more accessible to students and people in lower-income countries.
* Suggest that more organizations be added to the platform, to give donors a wider range of causes they can support with their small contributions.
Uncertainties:
* Are there alternative platforms or methods that allow very small one-time donations to EA-aligned charities?
* Is there a reason behind the $5 minimum that I'm unaware of, and could it be adjusted to be more inclusive?
I strongly believe that cultivating a habit of giving, even with small amounts, helps build a long-term culture of altruism — and it would
Hi Vasco, thanks for your questions!
I’ll answer what I see as the core of your questions before providing some quick responses to each individually.
As you suggest, our approach is very similar to Open Philanthropy’s worldview diversification. One way of looking at it is, we want to provide donation recommendations that maximise cost-effectiveness from the perspective of a particular worldview. We think it makes sense to add another constraint to this, which is that we prioritise providing advice to more plausible worldviews that are consistent with our approach (i.e., focusing on outcomes, having a degree of impartiality, and wanting to rely on evidence and reason).
I’ll share how this works with an example. The “global health and wellbeing” cause area contains recommendations that appeal to people with (some combination) of the following beliefs:
People may donate to the cause area without all of these beliefs, or with some combination, or perhaps with none of them but with another motivation not included. Perhaps they have more granular beliefs on top of these, which means they might only be interested in a subset of the fund (e.g., focusing on charities that improve lives rather than save them).
Many of your questions seem to be suggesting that, when we account for consumption of animal products, (3) and (4) are not so plausible. I suspect that this is among the strongest critiques for worldviews that would support GHW. I have my own views about it (as would my colleagues), but from a “GWWC” perspective, we don’t feel confident enough in this argument to use it as a basis to not support this kind of work. In other words, we think the worldviews that would want to give to GHW are sufficiently plausible.
I acknowledge there’s a question-begging element to this response: I take it your point is why is it sufficiently plausible, and who decides this? Unfortunately, we can acknowledge that we don’t have a strong justification here. It’s a subjective judgement formed by the research team, informed by existing cause prioritisation work from other organisations. We don’t feel well-placed to do this work directly (for much the same reason as we need to evaluate evaluators rather than doing charity evaluation ourselves). We would be open to investigating these questions further by speaking with organisations engaging in this cause-prioritisation — we’d love to have a more thoughtful and justified approach to cause prioritisation. In other words, I think you’re pushing on the right place (and hence this answer isn’t particularly satisfying).
More generally, we’re all too aware that there are only two of us working directly to decide our recommendation and are reluctant to use our own personal worldviews in highly contested areas to determine our recommendations. Of course, it has to happen to some degree (and we aim to be transparent about it). For example, if I were to donate today, I would likely give 100% of my donations to our Risks and Resilience Fund. I have my reasons, and think I’m making the right decision according to my own views, but I’m aware others would disagree with me, and in my role I need to make decisions about our recommendations through the lens of commonly held worldviews I disagree with.
I’ll now go through your questions individually:
We’d likely suggest donating to our cause area funds, via the “all cause bundle”, splitting their allocations equally between the three areas. This is our default “set-and-forget” option, that seems compelling from a perspective of wanting to give a fraction of one’s giving to causes that are maximally effective from particular worldviews. This is not the optimal allocation of moral uncertainty (on this approach, the different worldviews could ‘trade’ and increase their combined impact); we haven’t prioritised trying to find such an optimised portfolio for this purpose. It’d be an interesting project, and would encourage anyone to do this and share it on the Forum and with us!
We are not confident. This is going to depend on how you value animals compared to humans; we’re also not sure exactly how cost-effective the AWF Fund is (just that it is the best option we know of in a cause area we think is generally important, tractable and neglected).
If we thought there wasn’t a sufficiently plausible worldview whereby TCF was the best option we knew of, we would not recommend it.
We did not consider this, and so do not have a considered answer. I think this would be something we would be interested in considering in our next investigation.
As above, we would if we didn’t think there was a sufficiently strong worldview by which TCF was the best option we knew of. This could be because of a combination of the meat eater problem, and that we think it’s just not plausible to discount animals. It’s an interesting question, but it’s also one where I’m not sure our comparative advantage is coming to a view on it (though perhaps, just as we did with the view that GW should focus on economic progress, we could still discuss it in our evaluation).