All of ClareDonaldson's Comments + Replies
Hi! We at LEEP would also be excited about a campaign at something like $100 million/year - great to see you submitted the idea Rory. We recently wrote this proposal aimed at the Biden administration with some of our ideas: https://www.dayoneproject.org/post/eliminating-childhood-lead-poisoning-worldwide
And yes, we’re currently a small team (3 FTE), but hoping to expand significantly later this year!
Thanks CE team! I was chatting to a driver here in Freetown today about this. He thought that enforcement would be a big barrier (as you say in the summary). It's common for drivers to pay bribes to police officers - for example, if you're caught drink-driving, apparently you can usually pay some money and then continue on your way. You can even buy a driving license without taking any kind of driving test.
He also said that they don't have a law about wearing a motorcycle helmet at the moment because of ebola and covid making it unsafe to share a helmet?
A couple of observations related to your points from Freetown, Sierra Leone (I'm not too sure if this would be similar to the locations considered here). First, there are lots of traffic jams. My journey times are _much_ more heavily dependent on the amount of traffic than speed limits. It's pretty rare that there's open, good-enough roads to get up speed (but when there are, drivers go pretty fast). Second, the police pull drivers over regularly - usually for no reason other than to check the driver's license (as far as I can tell). It's common that the police ask for money regardless of whether you have your license (e.g. it's easy to say they saw you breaking some rule - the driver can't do anything other than argue or pay up).
I'm from the lead exposure charity mentioned (LEEP: https://leadelimination.org/) - if banning lead paint counts as urban development then feel free to email me clare@leadelimination.org - we can definitely suggest some countries we're beginning work in.
Thanks for this Sanjay! I have been told that the Charities Commission are being particularly slow at the moment, which pushed me towards seeking outside help - to aim to get it right first time.
Another option is to find some lawyers willing to help pro bono (for free). Although early, so far I have had a very positive experience with Latham & Watkins: https://www.lw.com/AboutUs/ProBono. I was connected via Charity Entrepreneurship, I don't know how easy it is to find other options.
On life expectancy
How much variation in life expectancy is there across and within counties? I would expect the life expectancy of those whose lives are saved by GiveWell charities to be among the very lowest and if there’s lots of variation in life expectancy, then the relevant life expectancy could be significantly lower than at the county or national level. [...] Your bounds seem too high to me, given the evidence you cite.
That’s a good point - something we could look into more next time. (In general we spent more time on the decisions sp...
Thanks a lot for your detailed comments Aidan, and others at Founders Pledge! We really appreciate the feedback and think our future work on this will benefit from it a great deal. Michael, Joel and I will reply to your comments individually.
On the major comment: This is a great point and something I hadn’t thought of before. Your explanation is very helpful. It’s really striking how large a difference it makes. We will update the post and Guesstimate model soon to correct this.
One thing I can’t quite get my head round - if we divide E(C) by E(L) then don’...
Hi Matt. Thanks for your concrete suggestions on the data visualisation. I think we made the mistake of adding more and more information without re-thinking what exactly we’re trying to show.
On how the work is being received by other evaluation orgs: I’m not too sure. I suspect other orgs will be more interested in how we do the final evaluation, rather than the preliminary filtering. Hopefully we’ll also get more feedback this weekend at EAGxVirtual (Jasper is giving a talk).
And from mental health experts: My impression from speakin...
Thanks Ruth! It's true that oil-based paints are much more common in Malawi relative to water-based paints (aka latex or emulsion) compared to more industrialised countries. Our best guess is that 60% of decorative paints sold are oil-based in Malawi. And yes, so far the manufacturers we've been speaking to are planning on replacing the lead pigments in their oil-based paints. As far as I know, it's also possible to make water-based paints without complicated/expensive equipment. Some reasons we've heard for why oil-based paints are popular are they'... (read more)