Link post for 2022 September EA Updates.

Top Links

• What We Owe The Future is now out, with Will MacAskill arguing for longtermism
• Giving What We Can and Longview Philanthropy have launched the Longtermism Fund, for donors looking to support longtermist work
• GiveWell with changes to their top charity recommendation criteria
• Froolow with a critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness model
• John G. Halstead - Climate Change & Longtermism: new book-length report
• Rose Hadshar - What happens on the average day?
• Michael Cassidy and Lara Mani with a paper in Nature arguing that we should prepare for huge volcanic eruptions
• Benjamin Todd - Do recent breakthroughs mean transformative AI is coming sooner than we thought?
• DeepMind alignment team opinions on AGI ruin arguments
• Martin B looking at a referendum in Switzerland on whether very strict regulations should apply to agricultural animal husbandry

Events

• 16th-18th September - EAGxBerlin
• 23rd-25th September - EA Global: Washington, D.C.
• September to December - Prague Fall Season
• November to January - Mexico EA Fellowship
• 4th-6th November - EAGxRotterdam - Applications now open
• 2nd-4th December - EAGxBerkeley

Virtual Events

• 4th September - Giving What We Can Meetup joined by Leah Edgerton
• 8th September - Fauna Connections: Using Data to Help Animals
• 13th September - Do the Rich Pay Their Fair Share? - a debate with Peter Singer and Bryan Caplan
• 13th September - How To Get Your Project Funded - A talk by Joey Savoie from CE
• 19th September - Animal Advocacy Course - Sign up by September 18th for this 9 week course
• EA Virtual Programmes - Apply by September 25th
  • The Precipice Reading Group
  • Intro to EA
  • In-Depth EA Program
• 21st-23rd October - EAGx Virtual

Meta

• Kelsey Piper - Caring about the future doesn’t mean ignoring the present
• Tyler Maule - Historical EA funding data
• Dylan Matthews looking at the critiques of billionaires within effective altruism
• Pia Voltz - We need more recruiters in EA
• Scott Alexander - Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions
• Peter Wildeford - Notes on how prizes may fail and how to reduce the risk of them failing
• Anya Hunt and Katie Glass - Gaps and opportunities in the EA talent & recruiting landscape
• Allen Bell - EA Culture and Causes: Less is More
• Zoe Williams has started weekly summaries of EA Forum and Less Wrong posts
• Falk Lieder and Joel McGuire - Finding before funding: Why EA should probably invest more in research
• Julian Hazell - We are still in triage
• Peter Hartree - Some core assumptions of effective altruism, according to me
• Jack Lewars - EA in the mainstream media: if you're not at the table, you're on the menu
• Julian Hazell - Why I view effective giving as complementary to direct work
• Hailey Dickson - Driving Education on EA Topics Through Khan Academy
• CEA have made a new intro to EA
• James Ozden and Sam Glover - Protest movements: How effective are they?
• Sam Coggins - Should we call ourselves 'Effective Altruists'?
• If you are interested in contributing to China-related global priorities outreach you can find out more here
• CEA are looking for feedback on the updated EA Handbook
• David Janku with an update on what Effective Thesis have been up to
• Sid Efromovich with a post suggesting we should fund more infrastructure support for impactful giving
• Kirsten - 4 Ways to Give Feedback to Job or Grant Applicants
• Freedomandutility - EAs underestimate uncertainty in cause prioritisation
• Owen Cotton-Barratt - How and when should we incentivize people to leave EA bubbles and explore?
• Peter Elam - What a Large and Welcoming EA Could Accomplish
• Cinera - Are "Bad People" Really Unwelcome in EA?
• Dan Epstein - Leveraging Defaults and Social Norms in EA giving
• Kat Woods and Amber Dawn - An EA guide to hiring
• Megan Jamer - EA Giving Tuesday will likely hibernate in 2022
• Freedomandutility - Prioritisation should consider potential for ongoing evaluation alongside expected value and evidence quality
• Kendrea Beers asking if there is too much EA advertising

New Projects

• Effective Altruism Psychology Lab, a team of researchers focused on empirically studying the psychology of EA
• The Tarbell Fellowship - A one year programme for early-career journalists intent on improving the world. Apply by 9th October
• Davit Jintcharadze has set up the Opportunity Center, aiming to help Georgian students to work on the world's most pressing issues
• The Atlas Fellowship India has been set up for Indian students who want to help change the world
• James Ozden has started the Social Movement Digest, a monthly roundup of social movement related content
• There is a new community for data science/ML/AI people interested in EA
• Giving What We Can are running charity elections again this year, for school students to vote on impactful charities to donate to
• Julian Hazell with a call for people to summarise EA content
• Yonatan Cale and Soof Golan have created a new view for the 80,000 Hours job board
• A post introducing Squiggle, a programming language for probabilistic estimation
• Radio Bostrom: Audio narrations of papers by Nick Bostrom
• SEADS - a data science consultancy that offers services to EA organisations

Fellowships, Programs & Scholarships

• Economics of Ideas, Science and Innovation Online PhD Short Course by the Institute for Progress - 6th September
• Effective Institutions Project - Fellowship - 9th September
• Center for AI Safety Philosophy Fellowship - 7 month fellowship for philosophy Ph.D. candidates and graduates - 30th September
• Open Philanthropy Biosecurity Scholarships - 11th October

Careers

• Toby Jolly with a post looking at how to have impact in the UK civil service
• Charity Entrepreneurship have started their own career coaching service
• Mark Xu - How to do theoretical research, a personal perspective
• Lukas Jasiunas and Isaac Esparza - A subjective account of what it's like to join an EA-aligned org without previous EA knowledge
• Pia Voltz with a job profile for people considering recruiting as a career
• Nat Goldthwaite - How avoiding drastic career changes could support EA's epistemic health and long-term efficacy
• Kevin Wei and Saad Siddiqui - A review of the Schwarzman Scholars program for EAs
• Molly - Military Service as an Option to Build Career Capital
• If you're seeking operations roles in EA in the next 1-6 months you can list yourself on the new EA operations database
• Probably Good with the career profile - Civil Service Careers in Low- and Middle-income Countries

Community building

• Kearney Capuano - Why You Should Give a TEDX Talk
• Philip Hall Andersen - Red teaming introductory EA courses
• Advice the CEA groups team gives to new university group organisers
• Sofya Lebedeva - Workflows: an experimental alternative to introductory fellowships
• A post announcing the EA Gather Town Event Hall as a global hub for online events
• Eli Rose - Open Philanthropy is still seeking proposals for outreach and community-building projects
• Julia Wise - The community health team’s work on interpersonal harm in the community
• Open Phil is seeking bilingual people to help translate EA/EA-adjacent web content into non-English languages

Critiques

See all the entries to the Criticism and Red Teaming contest here

• Rhodri Davies - Why am I not an Effective Altruist?
• Erik Hoel - Why I am not an effective altruist
• TheOtherHannah - demographics and power structures in EA
• Aaron Bergman - Most Ivy-smart students aren't at Ivy-tier schools
• Joseph Lemien - Should EA shift away (a bit) from elite universities?
• Parth Thaya - Effective altruism is no longer the right name for the movement
• Carla Zoe Cremer with a Twitter thread critique on the lack of institutional safeguards in EA
• A post critiquing EA on the lack of expertise generally, and the 'Risks from Nuclear Weapons' series by Luisa Rodriguez specifically
• Julian Hazell - The EA community might be neglecting the value of influencing people
• Clearer Thinking podcast with Michael Nielsen and Ajeya Cotra - Critiquing Effective Altruism
• Freddie deBoer - Effective Altruism Has a Novelty Problem
• Wei Dai - Questioning the Foundations of EA
• Richard Y Chappell - The Nietzschean Challenge to Effective Altruism
• Étienne Fortier-Dubois - Aesthetics as Epistemic Humility
• Hamish Huggard - Crowdsourced Criticisms: What does EA think about EA?

Grants

• Open Philanthropy have made 112 grants recently, with a value of $132 million
  • $47,300,000 - Farm Animal Welfare
    • $25,000,000 - The Humane League
    • $6,000,000 - Anima International
    • $3,000,000 - Albert Schweitzer Foundation
    • $3,000,000 - Food and Agriculture Research - Keel Bone Damage Reduction
  • $37,700,000 - Human Health and Wellbeing
    • $13,600,000 - New Incentives - Nigeria
    • $4,600,000 - University of Connecticut Health Center - Syphilis Vaccine Development
    • $4,000,000 - International Vaccine Institute - Hepatitis E Vaccine Trial
    • $2,500,000 - International Vaccine Institute - Cholera Vaccine Clinical Trial
    • $2,500,000 - Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur - Rural Air Quality Monitoring
    • $1,000,000 - Center for Global Development
  • $14,300,000 - Effective Altruism Community Growth
    • $7,000,000 - Effective Altruism Funds - Re-Granting Support
    • $4,250,000 - 80,000 Hours
    • $1,600,000 - Charity Entrepreneurship
    • $600,000 - Giving What We Can
  • $8,900,000 - Potential Risks from Advanced AI
    • $2,700,000 - Rethink Priorities
    • $5,700,000 - Other Areas
    • $5,500,000 - Metaculus
  • $5,400,000 - Longtermism
    • $3,000,000 - Kurzgesagt
    • $500,000 - Longview Philanthropy - Nuclear Security Grantmaking
  • $3,600,000 - Criminal Justice Reform
  • $3,100,000 - Land Use Reform
  • $2,500,000 - Macroeconomic Stabilisation Policy
  • $1,900,000 - Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
  • $1,300,000 - Scientific Research
• EA Long-Term Future Fund made 34 grants worth $2,100,000
  • $305,000 - EA Switzerland/PIBBSS Fellowship
  • $250,000 - Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative
  • $250,000 - Kristaps Zilgalvis
• EA Animal Welfare Fund have made 25 grants with a value of $2,200,000
  • $400,000 - Wild Animal Initiative
  • $250,000 - Rethink Priorities
  • $185,000 - Southeast Asia Farm Animal Welfare Fellowship
  • $130,000 - Cambridge Effective Altruism CIC

Global Development

• GiveDirectly with a response to the top charities update from GiveWell
• Shakeel Hashim - Should GiveWell still recommend GiveDirectly?
• Dylan Matthews on the rise of GiveDirectly
• Lucas Lewit-Mendes - Economic losers: SoGive's review of deworming, and why we're less positive than GiveWell
• Siobhan McDonough with an article on USAID and how they are evaluating impact
• Matt HR - The Case for Funding New Long-Term Randomised Controlled Trials of Deworming
• Karthik Tadepalli - Inequality is a (small) problem for EA and economic growth
• Joel McGuire, Samuel Dupret, Michael Plant - To WELLBY or not to WELLBY? Measuring non-health, non-pecuniary benefits using subjective wellbeing

Animal Welfare

• The Animal & Vegan Advocacy Summit will take place in Washington, DC on October 20th-23rd, with speakers including Peter Singer, Bruce Friedrich, Leah Garcés and Lauren Mee
• The neoliberal podcast spoke to Lewis Bollard about reducing animal suffering
• Rose Hadshar - What’s alive right now?
• Kenny Torrella looking at a new study that suggests bees can feel pain
• Brian Katemen - Conservation Biologists Need To Start Caring About Actual Animals - Not Just Species
• Clearer Thinking podcast with Alene Anello discussing human bias in the definition of intelligence
• Saulius Simcikas - Lobbying governments to improve wild animal welfare
• Animal Advocacy Careers have launched a volunteer referral program
• Rachel Norman and Meghan Barrett - Research summary: brain cell counts in Black Soldier Flies
• Toby Tremlett - Philosophical Argument Isn't Enough In Animal Ethics
• Animal Ask - Maximising impact: the case for research to support animal advocacy efforts

Biosecurity

• CEA have a new service to connect people interested in using their careers to mitigate global catastrophic biological risks with people who work in the field
• Hear This Idea podcast with Kevin Esvelt and Jonas Sandbrink on risks from biological research
• A post suggesting that antiviral photodynamic therapy seems underfunded

Existential & Catastrophic Risks

• Gregory Lewis - Most* small probabilities aren't pascalian
• A post introducing the Existential Risks Introductory Course, an 8 week programme
• The 2022 Future of Life Award winners have been announced, for 8 people who reduced 'the risk of nuclear war by developing and popularizing the science of nuclear winter'
• Luis Enrique Urtubey - Superforecasting Long-Term Risks and Climate Change
• Will Aldred - Feedback I've been giving to junior x-risk researchers
• Eli Lifland - Prioritizing x-risks may require caring about future people
• Catherine Brewer - On the Vulnerable World Hypothesis
• David Thorstad - Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils
• A post interactively visualising existential risks
• Kurzgesagt Video - Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse? (with 6 million views already)
• A new paper from CSER exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios
• Matthew Allcock - Cosmic rays could cause major electronic disruption and pose a small existential risk
• HTC - What if states don't listen? A fundamental gap in x-risk reduction strategies
• Matt Boyd & Nick Wilson - Islands, nuclear winter, and trade disruption as a human existential risk factor

Improving Institutions & Metascience

• Tyler Cowen - Will open science matter?
• Stuart Buck - Advice For New Scientific Funders (ARPA-H, ARIA, NSF TIP, Etc.)
• A study looking at whether international treaties have been able to produce their intended affects
• Alisha Lewis - How should we invest in democracy as an EA-adjacent issue? Some early thoughts
• Ilan Gur and Matt Clifford in The Economist explain innovations at the new research agency Advanced Research and Invention Agency

Environment

• Bryan Walsh - What could a nuclear war do to the climate - and humanity?
• An article in the BBC arguing for more studies on catastrophic climate change
• Gideon Futerman - What 80,000 Hours gets wrong about solar geoengineering
• Erola Pons - The case for Green Growth skepticism and GDP agnosticism

Longtermism

• Will MacAskill writing in the New York Times with the case for longtermism
• Future Matters Newsletter - AI timelines, AGI risk, and existential risk from climate change
• Matthew Yglesias - What's long-term about "longtermism"?
• Christian Ruhl - Explaining a Small Patient Philanthropy Fund Grant on Nuclear Security
• Sam Hilton - Some concerns about policy work funding and the Long Term Future Fund
• A collection of articles from a recent symposium on longtermism and the law, including contributions from Christoph Winter, Jeff Sebo, Renan Araújo and Leonie Koessler
• Richard Pettigrew - Longtermism, risk, and extinction
• Tyler Cowen - Eternal economic growth and Effective Altruism
• Dwarkesh Patel - Response to Tyler Cowen on eternal growth
• Maxwell Tabarrok - The Most Important Century Is Not Unlikely
• A post with a proposed tweak to the longtermism pitch
• Siméon Campos & Amber Dawn Ace - Longtermists Should Work on AI - There is No "AI Neutral" Scenario
• Jordan Arel - How I Came To Longtermism On My Own & An Outsider Perspective On EA Longtermism

WWOTF Interviews And Reviews

• Time
• Wired
• BBC Future
• The Atlantic
• The Guardian
• Freakonomics
• Boston Review
• Foreign Affairs
• The New Yorker
• Modern Wisdom
• Daily Stoic Podcast
• Richard Y Chappell
• The Tim Ferris Show
• Think with Krys Boyd
• NY Mag: Intelligencer
• 80,000 Hours Podcast
• Making Sense Podcast
• Wild with Sarah Wilson
• Reddit Ask Me Anything
• United Nations Dispatch
• NPR with Malaka Gharib
• Five Books: Longtermism
• The Lunar Society Podcast
• Michael Townsend Review
• EA Forum Ask Me Anything
• Conversations With Coleman
• Conversations with Tyler Cowen
• New York Times: The Ezra Klein Show

Longtermism Critiques

• Magnus Vinding - Critique of MacAskill’s “Is It Good to Make Happy People?”
• Pablo Rosado - A critique of strong longtermism
• Robert Wright - The case for Shorttermism
• Roh - A Quick Qualitative Analysis of Laypeople’s Critiques of Longtermism
• Brian Lui - Against longtermism
• A post with several arguments against longtermism
• Benj Azose - We’re really bad at guessing the future

AI Policy

• Haydn Belfield and Shin Shin Hua - How can EU competition law influence AI development and help ensure that its future development is safe and beneficial?
• Cullen O’Keefe, Jade Leung and Markus Anderljung - How technical safety standards could promote TAI safety
• Matthijs Maas - The History, Epistemology and Strategy of Technological Restraint, and lessons for AI
• Jan Leike on the windfall clause
• Markus Anderljung and Charlotte Siegmann - The Brussels Effect and AI: How EU AI regulation will impact the global AI market

Technical AI

• Open AI with 'Our approach to alignment research'
• Katja Grace - What do ML researchers think about AI in 2022?
• Jacob Hilton - Common misconceptions about OpenAI
• Nuño Sempere - A concern about the “evolutionary anchor” of Ajeya Cotra’s report on AI timelines
• Richard Ngo - The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective
• Thomas W, Dan Hendrycks and Oliver Zhang have created an introduction to ML safety course
• José Luis Ricón with an in depth post attempting to clarify his thoughts on AGI risks
• Will Aldred - AI timelines via bioanchors: the debate in one place
• The Center for AI Safety is announcing a $20,000 bounty for the best publicly-understandable explainers of topics in AI safety

Other AI

• Benjamin Hilton with a new 80,000 Hours problem profile on preventing an AI-related catastrophe
• Kelsey Piper - There are two factions working to prevent AI dangers. Here’s why they’re deeply divided
• Bryan Walsh looking at recent breakthroughs in AI and what good it can do
• Jamie Harris - The History of AI Rights Research
• Neel Nanda - Concrete Advice for Forming Inside Views on AI Safety
• Alex Lintz - Three pillars for avoiding AGI catastrophe: Technical alignment, deployment decisions, and coordination
• Olivia Addy - Why does no one care about AI?
• Steven Pinker and Scott Aaronson debate AI scaling
• Matthew Barber - Could realistic depictions of catastrophic AI risks effectively reduce said risks?
• Holden Karnofsky -
• AI strategy nearcasting
• How might we align transformative AI if it’s developed very soon?

Cause Exploration Prize

You can see all of the cause exploration prize entries here

• Global Development
  • Rosie Bettle - Oral healthcare in LMIC is a promising new cause area
  • Lee Crawfurd and Susannah Hares - The Economic Benefits of Promoting and Protecting the Rights of LGBTQ+ Communities in Developing Countries
  • Vastav Ratra - Reducing Judicial Delay in India
  • Jamie Simonson - Internal Migration: A Cost-Effective Method for Raising Wages, Improving Living Standards, and Promoting Economic Growth
  • Kristof - Tobacco harm reduction
  • Alex Hill - Maternal morbidity
  • Denise Melchin - Preventing stillbirths
  • Sickle Cell Disease
  • Road Safety: The Silent Epidemic Impacting Youth
  • Gavriel Kleinwaks, Alastair Fraser-Urquhart and Josh C Morrison - Indoor Air Quality to Reduce Infectious Respiratory Disease
  • Rich to Poor Country Spillovers
  • Michael - Occupational Health and Safety in the Developing World
  • Jeffrey Mason - Economic Growth and State Capacity
  • Jackson Wagner - Radio Ads Against Cousin Marriage in LMIC
  • Shen Javier - Child and Adolescent Mental Health in LMICs
  • Kelly Geddes - Transnational Surrogacy
  • Surbhi B - Adapting to Extreme Heat Exposure in South Asia
  • Ben Stewart - Organophosphate pesticides and other neurotoxicants
  • Arushi Gupta and Jendayi - International Macroeconomic Policy
  • Johannes Haushofer - Large-scale International Educational Migration: A Shallow Investigation
  • Sarah H and Ben Williamson - Family Planning: A Significant Opportunity for Impact
• Mental Health & Biology
  • John Boyle - Short-sleeper genes
  • Karolina Soltys - Improving diagnosis and treatment of bipolar spectrum disorders
  • Milan Griffes and Sandra Sobanska - Jhana meditation
  • Tim Farkas - Mind Enhancement Cause Exploration
  • Courtney Colston - Potential Risks of Advanced Gene Editing Technologies
  • Hauke Hillebrandt - Developmental Cognitive Neuroepidemiology
• Animal Welfare
  • David Lang with a post exploring genetic rescue as a way to protect wildlife from extinction
  • Enginar - Mitigating chicken and fish suffering by closing the “dairy gap” in Asia and Africa
  • Akash Kulgod - Free-Ranging Dog Welfare in India as a Cause Area
  • More Animal Advocacy R&D
  • Movable Virtual Fencing Systems and Livestock Welfare
• Other
  • Anna Harvey and Stuart Buck - Social and Behavioural Science R&D
  • Markus Over - Distribution of Information Among Humans
  • Jeremy R - New cause area: Traffic congestion
  • Wim - Steering and Stabilising Status Games
  • Sbhemer - Shareholder activism
  • Ben Yeoh - Advanced Market Commitments for public goods
  • Em Walz and Iska Knuuttila - Resilience & Biodiversity
  • Sebastian Joy - The importance of Intercausal Impacts
  • Benj Azose - Fix Prison Telecom
  • Minh Nguyen - Social Relationships: A Neglected Factor in Wellbeing
  • Marcus Ogren - Voting Methods
  • Sam Abbott and Nikos - Training experts to be forecasters

Other Causes

• Luis Mota and Charlotte - Justice and Global Priorities Research Reading List
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Samuel Charap on key lessons from five months of war in Ukraine
• Benjamin Hilton with an 80,000 Hours problem profile - Risks from atomically precise manufacturing
• Charlie Dougherty - Peacebuilding and Violent Conflict
• Geoffrey Miller - Could a 'permanent global totalitarian state' ever be permanent?
• Ruth Grace on the abundance agenda movement
• Nathan Barnard - Intelligence failures and a theory of change for forecasting
• Elias Au-Yeung - The Possibility of Microorganism Suffering
• Robert Long - Digital people: biology versus silicon

Philosophy

• Luis Mota with a moral progress reading list
• Lukas Gloor - Population Ethics Without Axiology: A Framework
• Khai - What reason is there not to accept Pascal's Wager?
• Luca Stocco - The repugnant conclusion is not a problem for the total view
• Levin - Common-sense cases where "hypothetical future people" matter
• Jason Crawford - Against population ethics
• Cold Button Issues - Toby Ord’s The Scourge, Reviewed
• Stijn - Avoiding the demandingness of total welfarism with rights-based discounted welfarism
• Applied Divinity Studies - The Repugnant Conclusion Isn't
• Sanjay with an attempt to solve Pascal's Muggings

Productivity

• Ben Kuhn - Some tips for good one-on-ones
• Abi Olvera - An Exercise in Speed-Reading

Other Links

• Dylan Matthews - How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force
• The Economist - What to read to understand “effective altruism”
• Adam Steinberg - Using expected value when donating to charity - and day-to-day
• Florence - Let’s not glorify people for how they look
• Tyler Alterman - Effective altruism in the garden of ends
• Founding the Against Malaria Foundation: Rob Mather's story
• Nuño Sempere - Introduction to Fermi estimates
• Anna Stadlerova - Translating The Precipice into Czech: My experience and recommendations
• Rob Bensinger - Have faux-evil EA energy
• Duncan S - The danger of good stories
• Michael Dickens - Philanthropists Probably Shouldn't Mission-Hedge AI Progress
• Michel Justen - Psychological Obstacles to Doing Good (Better)
• Clearer Thinking podcast discussing the use of stories for impact with Cate Hall, co-founder of Alvea
• Kat Woods - The most important lesson I learned after ten years in EA
• Simran Dhaliwal from Longview Philanthropy on the Giving What We Can Podcast
• Rosie Bettle on why she switched from academia to Founders Pledge
• Podcast with Joey Savoie on making it easier for great charities to exist

Tweets & Social Media

• Alexander Berger with a thread on what he learned from What We Owe The Future and key questions about longtermism that are unresolved
• Julian Hazel with 100 EA-related takes as a way of reflecting after ~2 years in the EA community
• Kelsey Piper with over 200 opinions on EA and it's critics
• Jess Whittlestone with thoughts on the difficulty of learning from criticism, inspired by recent critical discourse around EA
• Raquel Kasham Daniel on her experience with the intro to EA virtual programme
• Surbhi B with reflections from her first EA conference
• Tony Senanayake with 10 reflections from the first EA India retreat
• Hayley Worsham - How to Survive EAG: San Francisco FOMO
• Bhagyashree Prabhutendolkar with her experience of the Leaf EA course at Oxford

Good News

• The poverty rate in Cambodia fell to ~18% in 2020 from nearly 40% in 2009
• Global food prices are back to pre Ukraine war levels
• Zambia has pledged to abolish the death penalty