/'vɛðehi/ or VEH-they-hee
I'm Product Manager at the EA Hub and a community builder based in Singapore. I have a BA in Sociology. I have a background in social movement theory and structural functionalism. Currently building career capital while doing EA projects on the side.
Current Projects:
Hi Marc! This is an interesting topic that I hadn't thought much about, so thanks for posting! I have a few quick comments:
I have lived in a developing country for 6 years, I have reason to believe that embezzling could cut from 10% to 50% of donations received by charitable organizations in humanitarian and development settings. I can't back the statement because the data is really not there, but I am extremely confident about it.
Data on corruption numbers/scale of problem: Through A quick google search (<5 minutes) I found some interesting numbers on this by the Centre for Global Development which sugests the % is much closer to 10% than 50%. One thing that's interesting is they suggest using ‘the percentage of aid that delivers the impact it was designed to' to provide an upper-end figure for corruption (of course, not all impact is lost due to corruption). But looking at something like this might reveal bigger issues in aid - for example, a charity choosing interventions that are not very effective.
Additionally, it seems that the topic of corruption in NGOs is a pretty common concern (~5 million results), and there seem to be a number of proposed solutions. It may be useful to first evaluate existing interventions/organisations, and consider the benefits of supporting existing organisations or starting a new one in this space, and the value of focusing on this issues vs others.
Summary: My uncertainty about this post lies in how much your proposed interventions can contribute to the overall size of the problem, which interventions these are, and how neglected they are.
Terminology comment: Although you refer to Meta EA throughout this post, it seems what you are really talking about is EA community building specifically, as opposed to other Meta EA efforts which could include infrastructure, cross-cutting services to the EA ecosystem, meta research (e.g. global priorities research) etc. Does this sound right, or do you actually also mean other Meta EA activities?
I agree! I think there's some issue here (don't know if there's a word for it) where maybe some critical mass of effort on foreign powers is focused on china, leaving other countries with a big deficit or something. I'm not sure what the solution here is, perhaps other than to make some kind of "the case for becoming a [country X] specialist" for a bunch of potentially influential countries.
It's like a secret identity only EAs will understand :D
On a meta-level and unrelated to the post, I very much appreciated the intro and the picture of the cat :)
I am glad it resonated!
Question for Jona/the founders of the groups at other consulting firms: What did you do in the first ~3 months when starting out to get the momentum going at your organizations?
And Jona specifically what did you do to actually create the "network"?
To make writing newsletters less time consuming you could take interesting or relevant links from the existing EA newsletter and EA London Updates. More newsletters here: https://resources.eahub.org/learn/connect/#newsletters
Sorry! Must have missed that hanging sentence. There is no guarantee of the timescale across when these changes would happen.
Edited :)