Why Poverty?

Michelle_Hutchinson

Why Poverty?

Michelle_Hutchinson

3 min read · Apr 24, 2016

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Alarmingly, population growth in Africa is not slowing as quickly as demographers had expected. In 2004 the UN predicted that the continent’s population would grow from a little over 900m at the time, to about 2.3 billion in 2100. At the same time it put the world’s total population in 2100 at 9.1 billion, up from 7.3 billion today. But the UN’s latest estimates, published earlier this year, have global population in 2100 at 11.2 billion—and Africa is where almost all the newly added people will be. The UN now thinks that by 2100 the continent will be home to 4.4 billion people, an increase of more than 2 billion compared with its previous estimate.

If the new projections are right, geopolitics will be turned upside-down. By the end of this century, Africa will be home to 39% of the world’s population, almost as much as Asia, and four times the share of North America and Europe put together. At present only one of the world’s ten most populous countries is in Africa: Nigeria. In 2100, the UN believes, five will be: Nigeria, Congo, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Niger.

Although much could change in the next 85 years, none of those countries is a byword for stability or prosperity. A quadrupling of their population is unlikely to improve matters. If nothing else, the number of Africans seeking a better life in Europe and other richer places is likely to increase several times over.

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...even relative to their levels of income, health and education, the countries of sub-Saharan Africa have high fertility rates. That has prompted some scholars to posit cultural explanations.

One theory is that African men want big families to enhance their status; another that communal land-holding makes them economically beneficial, since resources are shared according to family size. Without dismissing these arguments, John Bongaarts of the Population Council, an international non-profit group, suggests a third: relatively low use of modern contraception. In many places, after all, vigorous campaigns to disseminate contraceptives and discourage big families have contributed to sudden and deep falls in fertility. Such a drive in the 1970s in Matlab, a district in Bangladesh, saw the share of women using contraceptives increase six-fold in 18 months.

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...The UN estimates that there are still 216m married women in the world who would like access to modern methods of contraception, but do not have it. The Copenhagen Consensus, a group of academics which rates development policies, reckons it would cost $3.6 billion a year to provide what they need. The benefits, in terms of the diminished need for infrastructure and social spending, reduced pollution and so on, would be $432 billion a year—120 times more. That is the second-most productive investment the project has identified, after liberalising trade, out of a welter of different development goals. Better yet, it helps with all the others.

The Economist

Note that giving poor people free contraception also provides a nice solution to the meat eater problem.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone has arguments against free contraception as a cause area.

Standing together

Giving What We Can is fundamentally trying to establish a baseline for action. Many of the claims effective altruists make seem initially strange and counter-intuitive. But there are some that should be really broadly acceptable: People’s lives and health matter equally whether they are born in the UK or Sierra Leone. We should help people more with our money if we can, even if that means doing the extra bit of research into which charities are the most effective. Those of us lucky enough to be on the median income in the UK have an amazing opportunity to help others simply due to the fact that even when we give away 10% of our income, we’re still in the richest 5% of people globally. We hope that these ideas can bring people with fairly different moral stances together, and can start people thinking both about how to compare the effectiveness of different organisations and about how much they can and would like to help others in their lives.

In order to do this, it’s important to demonstrate the importance of comparing cost-effectiveness within a space that people can broadly agree on. At the same time, we need to weigh that against really making a big difference in getting people to donate more cost-effectively. Some people would likely only be initially interested in hearing about the difference in cost-effectiveness between charities helping people in the UK, for example. But the differences in the good done between charities in the UK and those working in places where people are in extreme poverty seem to be much greater than those between different charities all working in the UK.

We are trying to strike a balance: having enough focus that people can find agreement and are galvanised to act, but being broad enough in the focus area that it plausibly encompasses the most effective interventions. Aiming at eliminating global poverty seems to strike such a balance. Early in our history, we thought that the best way to do this was to focus exclusively on poverty alleviation interventions, and never to mention other cause areas. The more general concept of effective altruism has caught on far more than we expected it to, indicating that people are more open to and inspired by cause neutrality than we had thought. We have therefore been increasingly highlighting areas other than just global poverty.

A robust evidence base

Another consideration for us in which charities to recommend and publicise is riskiness of charities: it doesn’t just matter what the expected value of a donation to a charity is, but also how likely it is that the donation might have no impact. Many people are disillusioned with charities in general, after the horror stories they’ve heard about charities wasting money that was entrusted to them. An important element of our work is persuading people that there are charities that are well-evidenced out there, who will definitely do good work with the money they are donated. Providing that thorough evidence base is important in encouraging people to donate in the first place – all the more so given that we are asking people to donate significantly. Making sure that people’s donations do in fact have an impact is important in making sure that they don’t get disillusioned later. We hope to normalise significant giving throughout people’s lives, not just in the short term.

Well-informed recommendations

Given the significant ask we make of members, they reasonably expect us to have a really thorough understanding of the charities we recommend. Our historical expertise has been in global health, though we have been increasing our scope (including for example climate change), and expect to continue to do so as we increase our research capacity.

These reasons together have meant that we have historically focused entirely on global poverty, and expect to continue doing so for the most part. That’s not to say we will continue with just the same approach. For example, one possibility we’re currently considering is developing an online platform that would allow people to input their preferred risk profile and how inclusive their moral system is, and would make donation recommendations based on that.