When weighing priorities for humanitarian assistance, how should one account for the (diverse) priorities of crisis-affected populations and how should one weigh their different priorities against one another? If you've come across writing on this, I'd love to get recommendations!
Note:
- I'm familiar with GiveWell's effort to understand how persons living in extreme poverty assigned moral weights.
- A colleague is exploring effective assistance whereas I'm looking at community priorities, so it's not for me to use the important + tractable + neglected framework. I am, however, interested in well-reasoned arguments about how they should interact if/when there is divergence on "what works" and what the crisis-affected populations want.
Some sub-questions:
- How should we account for the priorities of children? They comprise a large percentage of the crisis-affected population but are rarely consulted due to sensitivities around it.
- How should we weigh the urgent priorities of discrete minority groups? For example, following the cuts to ARV funding, persons with HIV/AIDS may strongly prioritise that assistance, but this may not be a priority for the general population. Even if they are willing to openly express their priorities, their priorities could be crowded out if one were to primarily look at overall community priorities. While disaggregation of preferences is necessary, there's a limit to the disaggregation and there's still the question about how one would weigh different groups' divergent prioritisation.
