Cross-posted from my blog
Introduction
In 2009, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid, a scathing critique of Western development efforts in Africa. She argued that decades of well-meaning aid had failed not only to lift African countries out of poverty, but had actively undermined their institutions, encouraged corruption, and created a culture of dependence. Aid, she concluded, was not saving Africa, it was holding it back.
Moyo was not the first to make such claims, and she wouldn't be the last. From economists (like William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden) to anthropologists (like Jason Hickel’s The Divide) a growing body of literature has criticized how foreign assistance, however generous in appearance, can replicate the very hierarchies and dependencies that colonialism once enforced through direct rule.
Today, a new form of philanthropy has emerged: Effective Altruism. EA, as it’s known, is a movement built around the idea that we should use reason and evidence to do the most good. Often this means funding highly cost-effective interventions like malaria prevention, deworming, or vaccination incentives in the world’s poorest countries, most often in sub-Saharan Africa. EA does not appeal to sentiment, loyalty, or proximity. Instead it seeks measurable impact, like how many lives the intervention saves per dollar, or how many “Quality Adjusted Life Years” it generates.
At first glance, this seems like a clear improvement over the failed aid of the past. But a new wave of critics, often informed by postcolonial theory, have begun to ask whether even these forms of giving can reproduce the same problems they aim to avoid. Could Effective Altruism be neocolonial?
What Is Neocolonialism?
Colonialism, as defined by political philosophers, is the reduction of one people’s sovereignty by another, typically through direct political and military domination.
Neocolonialism, by contrast, operates after formal independence. It sustains the same power dynamics through economic control, international institutions, and cultural influence.
As philosopher Oseni Taiwo Afisi writes, neocolonialism refers to “the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era in a given society.” It’s colonialism without conquest.
This framing matters. Sub-Saharan Africa, the region where EA often focuses its efforts, continues to bear the scars of colonialism. According to the World Bank:
These numbers are not an accident. They reflect what economists Acemoglu and Robinson call “dysfunctional institutions” rooted in centuries of slavery, conquest, and extractive rule. Philanthropy has long played a role in managing these inequalities. It was often used to soften or sanitize imperial policy, providing humanitarian cover for strategic control. Could EA be doing the same?
I will split the neocolonial critique into three parts: EA could replicate colonial power…
- By keeping poor people poor (e.g. addressing symptoms rather than causes)
- By making them dependent (e.g. undermining and displacing local institutions)
- By not listening to them (e.g. excluding the voices of those it aims to help)
In this post I will give an overview of the arguments and counterarguments people have given for these three critiques.
1. Does Effective Altruism Keep Poor People Poor?
Critics argue that EA treats extreme poverty as a technical issue: something to be managed with bed nets, deworming pills, or vaccines, but without addressing the deeper political and economic systems that cause it in the first place. The result, they say, is a form of charity that may alleviate suffering, but risks reinforcing global inequality and disempowerment.
This concern hinges on a key ethical idea: that charity should be a temporary bridge toward self-sufficiency. But effective altruism, critics argue, sometimes treats it as a permanent solution.
One of the more forceful critiques comes from an aid worker writing under the pseudonym Carneades, who argues that EA charities “take jobs away from communities,” “do not allow for communities to decide what they need,” and “do the work for a community, instead of building capacity and increasing autonomy.” This model, they warn, is great for the charity since it “ensures that the community will need aid forever.”
The political theorist Cecelia Lynch sees similar dangers, warning that EA “does not counter the neocolonial and paternalistic practices of the aid industry” and may even “reinscribe them more forcefully.” In her view, new philanthropy in general —and EA in particular— may appear innovative but often repeats old power dynamics in more technocratic language.
We saw how development economists like Dambisa Moyo and William Easterly share this concern about the modern aid sector. But perhaps it’s put most bluntly by Nobel prize winning economist Angus Deaton in The Great Escape:
Development is neither a financial nor a technical problem but a political problem, and the aid industry often makes the politics worse.
This is the core of the critique: poverty isn’t just about lacking resources — it’s about lacking control. And if interventions don’t help restore that control, they risk being palliative rather than transformative.
From this perspective, EA’s most celebrated charities may save lives without empowering communities. Critics argue that this turns poverty into a permanent management problem, rather than a structural injustice to be dismantled.
Counterarguments
Anthropologist China Scherz complicates this picture. Based on fieldwork with Ugandan nonprofits, she found that many aid recipients actually prefer programs that give them tangible things —food, medicine, money— over less direct “capacity-building” efforts. This might support EA’s focus on cost-effective interventions, although it might also be that the recipients think “capacity-building” charities could be better, but that good ones simply aren’t being created.
More direct counterarguments come from Effective Altruists themselves. Holden Karnofsky (co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy) and Will MacAskill (co-founder of the Centre for Effective Altruism) respond that the kinds of charities favored by EA are deliberately chosen because they don’t repeat past mistakes. They’re carefully researched, tested for negative side effects, and focused on interventions with clear, measurable benefits — like preventing deaths or increasing school attendance.
EA-philosopher Peter Singer echoes this, but with a more practical focus. He argues that if charity hasn’t worked in the past, it’s mostly because we haven’t done enough of it, not because it’s inherently flawed. Most rich countries still give far below the UN target of 0.7% of GNI, and political motives often override impact. Singer claims that in recent decades, “we [spent] more than three times as much on beauty products as the governments we elect spend on ending extreme poverty.”
Organizations like Giving What We Can agree and go even further. They argue that well-designed aid can actually strengthen institutions and create opportunities for sustainable long-term growth, if deployed with care. Rather than abandoning charity, they say we should reform and scale up the kind that works.
Decolonial critics, by and large, acknowledge that the worst-case view —that EA keeps people poor— is too strong. A more modest but still pressing version of the critique holds that EA currently underestimates the long-term risks of dependency, and does too little to support local political development or economic growth.
2. Does EA Keep Poor People Dependent?
Many critics don’t claim that effective altruism is inherently neocolonial. Rather, they argue that its current practice fails to take seriously enough the risks of keeping poor countries dependent. Even if the interventions are effective on paper, their broader political consequences may be corrosive.
Political scientist Emily Clough, for example, has argued that when an EA-aligned charity provides high-quality public services (like education or healthcare) in a given region, it can cause the state to scale back its own efforts. Rather than serving as a supplement, the NGO becomes a replacement, and people who aren’t reached by the charity lose access to services that might once have been theirs by right.
Philosopher Jeff McMahan, drawing on Clough’s critique, writes that:
“[Foreign aid] may enable dictators to [...] resist pressures to change the practices and institutions that perpetuate extreme poverty.”
When philanthropists work through NGOs, their efforts may conflict with and partly undermine the activities of more legitimate —and potentially more longterm effective— actors, such as local or national governments. In bypassing states, NGOs remove the incentive for those states to improve, weakening long-term accountability and capacity.
Nobel prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu raises a similar concern. Even when EA-funded services are well-intentioned and evidence-based, they may still erode institutional legitimacy:
“When key services we expect from states are taken over by other entities, building trust in the state and developing state capacity in other crucial areas may become harder.”
Philosopher Larry Temkin adds another layer to the critique: outside actors can pull highly qualified locals out of the public sector to work for NGOs, shift national priorities to align with foreign interests, and reduce governments’ responsiveness to their citizens. In his words, these interventions risk “negatively impacting local authority and autonomy.”
In other words, even if EA-style aid helps individuals survive, it might do so in ways that damage the very systems needed to support people sustainably.
This leads to a broader point made by Angus Deaton: the problem is not simply lack of money. It’s politics:
“Development is neither a financial nor a technical problem but a political problem, and the aid industry often makes the politics worse. […]
Lack of money is not killing people. The true villains are the chronically disorganized and underfunded health care systems about which governments care little, along with well-founded distrust of those governments and foreigners, even when their advice is correct.”
If foreign charities become the main providers of essential services, governments may stop investing in their own systems, and citizens may stop expecting them to. In this scenario, what appears as humanitarian relief may end up as a long-term governance failure, one that mimics —and in some cases reinforces— colonial dynamics.
Whether framed as a short-term displacement of public institutions or a long-term erosion of democratic self-governance, the critique is clear: the more people rely on aid from outside actors, the harder it becomes to demand lasting solutions from inside.
Counterarguments
Effective altruists acknowledge that aid can have unintended consequences. But they argue that critics often overlook the positive, long-term effects that even simple interventions can produce, effects that go beyond survival and into the realm of empowerment.
Holden Karnofsky argues that aid shouldn’t just be measured by how many lives it saves, but also by the indirect ripple effects it creates. A child who survives malaria can go to school. A family that receives a cash transfer can invest in a small business. These kinds of material improvements, over time, can create the conditions for political engagement and social transformation. Karnofsky writes:
“A substantial part of the good that one does may be indirect: the people that one helps directly [...] become more empowered to contribute to society, and this in turn may empower others.”
He even suggests that the long-term political and social gains might outweigh the immediate health or income gains EA charities typically measure.
This view is supported by historical analysis. As sociologists Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello have argued, it is precisely when material insecurity decreases that movements for justice and reform tend to grow stronger. When people are no longer consumed by the daily struggle to survive, they can begin to organize, protest, and build alternatives. In this sense, interventions that reduce suffering might be a prerequisite for grassroots resistance.
Another counterargument is that some EAs have looked at ways to make structural improvements. For example, Hauke Hillebrandt and John Halstead wrote a popular essay on the EA Forum arguing that typical EA interventions do little to promote sustained economic growth, and EAs should look at more systemic interventions instead. The essay was very well received and even won an EA Forum prize. It may be that EA is already in the process of changing, but it just takes a while to set in.
3. Does EA Fail To Listen To Poor People?
The final, and perhaps most foundational critique, is that EA interventions are too often designed from the outside —based on what donors or researchers believe is effective— without meaningful consultation with the people these interventions are supposed to help.
The result, critics say, is not just technocratic or impersonal, but paternalistic: a form of help that is imposed, rather than co-created. If poor people are experts in their own needs, who is in a better position to know what would help them? And if effective altruists genuinely want to improve lives, why not begin by amplifying the voices of those they aim to support?
Philosopher Monique Deveaux highlights the political stakes of this. She warns that some forms of aid can “actively undermine grassroots efforts to bring about transformative social change by diverting resources and short-circuiting community-led development processes.” The problem isn't only that EA misses certain voices, it's that its presence may actually make local organizing harder.
The aid worker “Carneades” adds a sharper critique:
[EA] promotes organizations that [...] focus on projects which apply across communities regardless of need. They do not build projects from the bottom up, they drop things from the top down. This harms developing democracies, and it does not allow for communities to decide what they need. Yes, systematically bottom up work is harder to do, but the effects are worth it.
Political theorist Jennifer Rubenstein offers a similar warning. She argues that while EA works well when the “low-hanging fruit” of health and cash interventions are available, deeper progress —especially when it requires systemic change or global reform— will demand far more collaboration with local activists. She writes:
“The effective altruism movement as Singer describes it does not cultivate the expectations, attitudes, or relationships necessary for this kind of work.”
Her suggestion? EA donors should begin supporting existing movements, especially those based in the global South, that are already fighting for inclusion, equality, and justice. She proposes the creation of a “database of effective social movements” to help donors direct attention toward local organizations with the power to shape change from within.
Geographer Matthew Doran goes even further, arguing that EA does not just fail to listen, it may be structurally incapable of hearing certain perspectives. He writes:
“EA’s interventions are only the most effective options according to the priorities and epistemology of its gatekeepers. They are not necessarily the most effective interventions according to the people who receive them.”
For Doran, the problem isn’t just one of bias, it’s one of “epistemic exclusion”. Many Global South perspectives on what matters, what works, and what counts as valid evidence may be “inadmissible or even un-hearable within EA” because they clash with what he calls “capitalist epistemology”; a framework that values quantifiable impact over political or cultural context.
Perhaps the most personal expression of this critique comes from Anthony Kalulu, a Ugandan farmer and activist. Kalulu argues that effective altruism is even worse than traditional philanthropy in how it excludes the poor. In his experience, even large Western foundations like the Gates Foundation occasionally support small grassroots initiatives, but not EA.
Counterarguments
If you look at survey-data of EA demographics, it would be hard to argue that people from the Global South are sufficiently represented:
However, there is one notable EA endorsed charity that does rely on the expertise of poor people. Direct Cash Transfers (DCTs) do what the name implies, they send money directly to people in need, allowing them to spend it however they like, without any strings attached. I’ve previously talked about how similar cash transfers are to reparations, a quintessential decolonial project. So even if this third critique does apply to some, or even most EA interventions, I’d argue DCTs show that it doesn’t apply to all EA interventions.
Conclusion
So, is effective altruism neocolonial?
The first critique (that it keeps people poor) doesn’t really hold. EA interventions do improve lives, and there’s no evidence they’re increasing poverty.
The second (that it makes people dependent) is more complicated. Some interventions risk weakening local institutions, but others may lay the groundwork for autonomy.
The third (that it doesn’t listen) has real force. EA often excludes the voices of those it aims to help, though cash transfers show that it doesn’t have to be an inherent part of the movement.
In short: Effective Altruism may be an improvement over traditional philanthropy of the past, but it’s not yet entirely free of neocolonial dynamics either.
A huge thanks to Maxim Vandaele for helping write this post. All opinions and mistakes are my own.
I feel like the concept of "neocolonialism" is pointing at some important things, but it's also fuzzy and maybe muddling the waters a bit on top of that, since it seems to come with some ideological baggage?
In particular, while I haven't read the texts you're referring to, it gives me the impression that it might be mixing together some things that are morally bad and preventable, like exploitation/greed and not treating certain groups the way we'd want ourselves to be treated, with things that are bad/unfair features of the world that can only be mitigated to a certain degree, because they reflect some of the very things that are bad about poverty and needing help in the first place. (Concretely: The potential for dependencies to develop when help is given -- that's a negative side-effect that we should try to mitigate, but it's to some extent inherent to the dynamics of receiving help and it's not clear it's a priority to mitigate it down to zero, and it certainly shouldn't categorically "taint" the help that was given in an absolute way independent of determining that the negative side-effects do in fact outweigh the positives. Or, on the cited demographics, it makes sense that people with less resources and power will find the idea of becoming an EA less appealing, since part of the appeal of EA, to many EAs, was that their personal resources can do an outsized amount of good or go further overseas. Lastly, there are some things about the nature of tradeoffs around effectiveness that will seem "cold and calculating," but in a way that doesn't let us draw any conclusions about a lack of care.)
So, I liked that you distilled the bad and preventable things that "neocolonialism" might be pointing to into three concrete questions. I find these questions important and think they point to challenging issues (and it would be surprising if anyone did a perfect job across the board).
However, at the end of your post, you go back to the fuzzy thing (EA not yet being free of "neocolonial dynamics"):
Here, I'm not sure to what degree you think this reflects:
(1) serious ("systemic"/"blind spot") failings of EA (perhaps not in the sense of EA being worse than other groups, but let's agree that we do want to hold ourselves to high standards);
(2) things that are good/important to improve, but more on the level of dozens other things that would be good to have as well, so not necessarily the cause of a systemic/blind spot issue;
(3) things that may match some of the connotations of "neocolonialism," but, on reflection, these things don't imply that EAs should do major things differently, because we disagree that the fuzzy concept "neocolonialism" is a well-suited lens for telling us what to do/avoid.
FWIW, in the abstract I think there most likely many things under (2) and perhaps also there could be something under (1), but my point is that it's particularly valuable here to be concrete. Your discussion does mention some things (like supporting grassroots work), but these are of the form "one expert critic said we should do this" and it's not clear how much you think that critic is right, and how much it matters compared to other things we could try to improve.