This is a genuinely useful resource, thank you. I've not encountered the Atlas before in agricultural value chain work in West Africa, but hadn't fully appreciated its potential as a cause prioritization tool. What strikes me is that the Economic Complexity Index makes visible something development discourse tends to obscure: the structural distance between where a country's productive capacity sits and where it needs to go. That distance is a map of where institutional intervention has the highest leverage exactly the kind of analysis EA cause prioritization should engage with, but rarely does. The product space framework also reframes the core question: not "what intervention produces the best RCT result" but "what structural moves make the most other moves possible." That is a more powerful question, and one that connects directly to climate adaptation, food systems, and AI governance in African contexts. If there's a real research agenda here applying complexity economics to EA cause prioritization in Sub-Saharan Africa, identifying high-leverage structural interventions that the current EA portfolio underweights because they resist standard impact metrics.
Hi everyone, My name is Arthur Kouadio. I'm based in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and I'm a Project Manager and Jurist with 3+ years of experience leading governance, sustainable agriculture, and human rights project across West Africa. How I came to effective altruism I didn't find EA through a book or a university group. I arrived through a slow, uncomfortable realization on the ground. I was running project that were well-managed, well-funded, and producing measurable outputs and yet something kept nagging at me: are we actually solving anything, or are we just managing problems more efficiently ? That question became impossible to ignore after my time as Executive Director of IASA, where I led a portfolio of sustainable agriculture and community governance projects aligned with SDG 2. The work was meaningful. But watching how well-intentioned interventions consistently failed to address root causes pushed me to look for a more rigorous framework. EA gave me the language and the tools to ask better questions not as an ideology, but as an honest method. What I'm working on and prioritizing I'm currently participating in the CEA Career Bootcamp, working to transition from nationally-scoped development work into a program management role within an EA-aligned organization. My priority cause areas are climate policy, global health and poverty, AI governance, and animal welfare with a particular focus on how these issues are experienced in the Global South, and how EA can better integrate those perspectives into its cause prioritization and program design. I recently shared a longer reflection on this here: [What three years of program delivery in West Africa taught me about EA's implementation gap](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnDQPGFW8vRFiAhrN/what-three-years-of-program-delivery-in-west-africa-taught?commentId=NdTomjvj4oHB85y2r) and the conversation in the comments has already been one of the most intellectually honest exchanges I've had on these questions. A fun fact I passed my law degree in Abidjan, then spent years learning how little law matters when the real constraints are political, relational, and logistical. That gap between formal frameworks and operational reality is what I find most interesting and most useful to think about. Looking forward to learning from and contributing to this community. If you're working on climat policy, governance, global health, AI policy, or operations in EA-aligned organizations or if you're also navigating this transition from the Global South I'd genuinely enjoy connecting.
This is a rigorous and well-structured argument, and I find the revenue growth framing particularly compelling it is the least theoretically laden of the three empirical anchors you present, and arguably the hardest to dismiss. I want to add a perspective that I think is largely absent from timeline discussions: what these timelines mean when you're not in San Francisco, London, or Beijing. I'm based in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. I work in governance and program management, and I've spent the last few years watching how technology including much more mundane technology than AGI lands in contexts where infrastructure is fragile, institutions are under-resourced, and regulatory capacity is almost nonexistent. What I observe is a consistent pattern: the capability arrives long before the governance does. And the communities that bear the consequences of that gap are rarely the ones who were part of the conversation about whether to deploy. Your point about METR's benchmarks not generalizing to "messier, open-ended tasks" resonates strongly from where I sit. In Côte d'Ivoire, almost every consequential task is messy and open-ended. Agricultural supply chains, local health delivery, land tenure disputes, budget transparency these are exactly the domains where AI is most likely to be deployed next, and least likely to perform as cleanly as benchmarks suggest. The failure modes in these contexts are not theoretical. This leads me to a concern that I think deserves more attention in timeline discussions: the question is not only when transformative AI arrives, but who governs its deployment in the interim. The revenue growth you cite is overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of countries. The regulatory frameworks being built right now in the EU, the US, the UK are being built without meaningful input from the regions most likely to be on the receiving end of AI deployment decisions made elsewhere. Whether timelines are short or long, that governance gap is already open. And closing it requires starting now not after we've resolved the empirical debate about 2035 versus 2052. I'd be curious whether others in this community are thinking seriously about what EA-aligned AI governance work looks like when it's designed for and by the Global South, rather than exported to it.
Yes. I think we would see meaningfully different interventions. Not necessarily better in every dimension, but different in ways that matter. The cause prioritization would likely weight governance reform, regional economic integration, and technology transfer much more heavily than the current EA portfolio does. Your point about the African Union and East Asian industrial policy is not peripheral it is central. The countries that escaped structural poverty in the 20th century did not do so primarily through philanthropic intervention. They did so through deliberate state capacity-building, strategic trade policy, and the political will to demand technology transfer as a condition of foreign investment. EA, as currently constituted, largely brackets these levers because they are politically complex and hard to evaluate with RCTs. Here's what I find genuinely interesting about your framing: it suggests that the composition of the EA community is not just a diversity issue it is a cause prioritization issue. The questions that feel most tractable from London or San Francisco may not be the questions with the highest leverage from Abidjan or Lagos. I don't think the answer is to build a separate "African EA". I think the answer is to create the conditions for this conversation to happen inside EA, with enough institutional weight that it actually shifts priorities rather than generating interesting forum threads. That's something I'd like to work toward concretely. If others in this conversation are interested in thinking about what that could look like a working group, a collaborative post, a structured research agenda. I'm genuinely open to exploring it. Let's not let this stop at a good exchange of ideas.
Simon, thank you for this and for the quality of the resources you've shared. I was not familiar with Seye Abimbola's The Foreign Gaze, but the framing immediately resonates. The "gaze" is not just an epistemological problem it has direct operational consequences. When global health programs are designed by people who have never had to make them work in a context like the one I've been working in, the assumptions embedded in the design tend to be invisible until they collide with reality on the ground. I'll look at the McGill summer course the timing is interesting given where I am in my own transition. What strikes me most about your comment is the distinction you draw between participation and leadership. Increasing Global South participation in EA groups is necessary but not sufficient. The structural blind spot I described is not primarily about who is in the room — it is about who is setting the agenda, defining the cause areas, and deciding what counts as rigorous evidence. Those are questions of power, not just representation. I'd genuinely enjoy continuing this conversation particularly around how EA might build accountability mechanisms that go beyond good intentions. Would you be open to connecting directly? Here is my contact information if needed: [email protected] ; https://www.linkedin.com/in/meniansou-n-arthur-kouadio-566373249
This is one of the most useful framings I've encountered for a tension I've felt but struggled to articulate clearly. James Ferguson's argument that development interventions systematically depoliticize the problems they claim to solve maps directly onto what I observed in the field. The machine produces outputs, but the underlying power structures remain untouched. Your point about EA working around the local knowledge problem rather than through it is sharp, and I think largely correct. Vaccines and cash transfers are genuinely brilliant precisely because they minimize the surface area for implementation failure. But I'd push back slightly on the implication that this is sufficient as a long-term strategy. The interventions that are currently "not saturated" as you put it are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster in exactly the domains where local context, political economy, and institutional relationships matter most: primary healthcare systems, land governance, nutrition policy, climate adaptation. At some point, EA will have to engage with the messiness it has been successfully avoiding. That's not a critique it's what I think the next frontier looks like. And it's part of why I think people with field experience in these contexts have something genuinely useful to contribute to the conversation, rather than just being recipients of well-designed interventions.
Thank you Tyler, and welcome to the conversation! I've added my LinkedIn to my profile feel free to connect: linkedin.com/in/meniansoun-arthur-kouadio-566373249 and my email is : [email protected]. I would be delighted for us to have an in-depth exchange for draft solutions. Your context at Chemonics is actually very relevant to what I'm thinking about. The dismantling of USAID is creating a real vacuum in implementation capacity across West Africa which leaves a big void and creates problems that I notice very often and the organizations that will fill that space are precisely those that can combine operational rigor with genuine local embeddedness. I'd be curious to hear how Chemonics is thinking about that pivot toward multilaterals and country governments. There may be more overlap in our thinking than it first appears.
This is a genuinely useful resource, thank you. I've not encountered the Atlas before in agricultural value chain work in West Africa, but hadn't fully appreciated its potential as a cause prioritization tool.
What strikes me is that the Economic Complexity Index makes visible something development discourse tends to obscure: the structural distance between where a country's productive capacity sits and where it needs to go. That distance is a map of where institutional intervention has the highest leverage exactly the kind of analysis EA cause prioritization should engage with, but rarely does.
The product space framework also reframes the core question: not "what intervention produces the best RCT result" but "what structural moves make the most other moves possible." That is a more powerful question, and one that connects directly to climate adaptation, food systems, and AI governance in African contexts.
If there's a real research agenda here applying complexity economics to EA cause prioritization in Sub-Saharan Africa, identifying high-leverage structural interventions that the current EA portfolio underweights because they resist standard impact metrics.
Hi everyone,
My name is Arthur Kouadio. I'm based in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, and I'm a Project Manager and Jurist with 3+ years of experience leading governance, sustainable agriculture, and human rights project across West Africa.
How I came to effective altruism
I didn't find EA through a book or a university group. I arrived through a slow, uncomfortable realization on the ground. I was running project that were well-managed, well-funded, and producing measurable outputs and yet something kept nagging at me: are we actually solving anything, or are we just managing problems more efficiently ?
That question became impossible to ignore after my time as Executive Director of IASA, where I led a portfolio of sustainable agriculture and community governance projects aligned with SDG 2. The work was meaningful. But watching how well-intentioned interventions consistently failed to address root causes pushed me to look for a more rigorous framework. EA gave me the language and the tools to ask better questions not as an ideology, but as an honest method.
What I'm working on and prioritizing
I'm currently participating in the CEA Career Bootcamp, working to transition from nationally-scoped development work into a program management role within an EA-aligned organization. My priority cause areas are climate policy, global health and poverty, AI governance, and animal welfare with a particular focus on how these issues are experienced in the Global South, and how EA can better integrate those perspectives into its cause prioritization and program design.
I recently shared a longer reflection on this here: [What three years of program delivery in West Africa taught me about EA's implementation gap](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tnDQPGFW8vRFiAhrN/what-three-years-of-program-delivery-in-west-africa-taught?commentId=NdTomjvj4oHB85y2r) and the conversation in the comments has already been one of the most intellectually honest exchanges I've had on these questions.
A fun fact
I passed my law degree in Abidjan, then spent years learning how little law matters when the real constraints are political, relational, and logistical. That gap between formal frameworks and operational reality is what I find most interesting and most useful to think about.
Looking forward to learning from and contributing to this community. If you're working on climat policy, governance, global health, AI policy, or operations in EA-aligned organizations or if you're also navigating this transition from the Global South I'd genuinely enjoy connecting.
This is a rigorous and well-structured argument, and I find the revenue growth framing particularly compelling it is the least theoretically laden of the three empirical anchors you present, and arguably the hardest to dismiss.
I want to add a perspective that I think is largely absent from timeline discussions: what these timelines mean when you're not in San Francisco, London, or Beijing.
I'm based in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. I work in governance and program management, and I've spent the last few years watching how technology including much more mundane technology than AGI lands in contexts where infrastructure is fragile, institutions are under-resourced, and regulatory capacity is almost nonexistent. What I observe is a consistent pattern: the capability arrives long before the governance does. And the communities that bear the consequences of that gap are rarely the ones who were part of the conversation about whether to deploy.
Your point about METR's benchmarks not generalizing to "messier, open-ended tasks" resonates strongly from where I sit. In Côte d'Ivoire, almost every consequential task is messy and open-ended. Agricultural supply chains, local health delivery, land tenure disputes, budget transparency these are exactly the domains where AI is most likely to be deployed next, and least likely to perform as cleanly as benchmarks suggest. The failure modes in these contexts are not theoretical.
This leads me to a concern that I think deserves more attention in timeline discussions: the question is not only when transformative AI arrives, but who governs its deployment in the interim. The revenue growth you cite is overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of countries. The regulatory frameworks being built right now in the EU, the US, the UK are being built without meaningful input from the regions most likely to be on the receiving end of AI deployment decisions made elsewhere.
Whether timelines are short or long, that governance gap is already open. And closing it requires starting now not after we've resolved the empirical debate about 2035 versus 2052.
I'd be curious whether others in this community are thinking seriously about what EA-aligned AI governance work looks like when it's designed for and by the Global South, rather than exported to it.
Yes. I think we would see meaningfully different interventions. Not necessarily better in every dimension, but different in ways that matter. The cause prioritization would likely weight governance reform, regional economic integration, and technology transfer much more heavily than the current EA portfolio does. Your point about the African Union and East Asian industrial policy is not peripheral it is central. The countries that escaped structural poverty in the 20th century did not do so primarily through philanthropic intervention. They did so through deliberate state capacity-building, strategic trade policy, and the political will to demand technology transfer as a condition of foreign investment. EA, as currently constituted, largely brackets these levers because they are politically complex and hard to evaluate with RCTs.
Here's what I find genuinely interesting about your framing: it suggests that the composition of the EA community is not just a diversity issue it is a cause prioritization issue. The questions that feel most tractable from London or San Francisco may not be the questions with the highest leverage from Abidjan or Lagos.
I don't think the answer is to build a separate "African EA". I think the answer is to create the conditions for this conversation to happen inside EA, with enough institutional weight that it actually shifts priorities rather than generating interesting forum threads.
That's something I'd like to work toward concretely. If others in this conversation are interested in thinking about what that could look like a working group, a collaborative post, a structured research agenda. I'm genuinely open to exploring it. Let's not let this stop at a good exchange of ideas.
Simon, thank you for this and for the quality of the resources you've shared. I was not familiar with Seye Abimbola's The Foreign Gaze, but the framing immediately resonates. The "gaze" is not just an epistemological problem it has direct operational consequences. When global health programs are designed by people who have never had to make them work in a context like the one I've been working in, the assumptions embedded in the design tend to be invisible until they collide with reality on the ground.
I'll look at the McGill summer course the timing is interesting given where I am in my own transition.
What strikes me most about your comment is the distinction you draw between participation and leadership. Increasing Global South participation in EA groups is necessary but not sufficient. The structural blind spot I described is not primarily about who is in the room — it is about who is setting the agenda, defining the cause areas, and deciding what counts as rigorous evidence. Those are questions of power, not just representation.
I'd genuinely enjoy continuing this conversation particularly around how EA might build accountability mechanisms that go beyond good intentions. Would you be open to connecting directly?
Here is my contact information if needed: [email protected] ; https://www.linkedin.com/in/meniansou-n-arthur-kouadio-566373249
This is one of the most useful framings I've encountered for a tension I've felt but struggled to articulate clearly. James Ferguson's argument that development interventions systematically depoliticize the problems they claim to solve maps directly onto what I observed in the field. The machine produces outputs, but the underlying power structures remain untouched.
Your point about EA working around the local knowledge problem rather than through it is sharp, and I think largely correct. Vaccines and cash transfers are genuinely brilliant precisely because they minimize the surface area for implementation failure. But I'd push back slightly on the implication that this is sufficient as a long-term strategy. The interventions that are currently "not saturated" as you put it are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster in exactly the domains where local context, political economy, and institutional relationships matter most: primary healthcare systems, land governance, nutrition policy, climate adaptation. At some point, EA will have to engage with the messiness it has been successfully avoiding.
That's not a critique it's what I think the next frontier looks like. And it's part of why I think people with field experience in these contexts have something genuinely useful to contribute to the conversation, rather than just being recipients of well-designed interventions.
Thank you Tyler, and welcome to the conversation! I've added my LinkedIn to my profile feel free to connect: linkedin.com/in/meniansoun-arthur-kouadio-566373249 and my email is : [email protected].
I would be delighted for us to have an in-depth exchange for draft solutions.
Your context at Chemonics is actually very relevant to what I'm thinking about. The dismantling of USAID is creating a real vacuum in implementation capacity across West Africa which leaves a big void and creates problems that I notice very often and the organizations that will fill that space are precisely those that can combine operational rigor with genuine local embeddedness. I'd be curious to hear how Chemonics is thinking about that pivot toward multilaterals and country governments. There may be more overlap in our thinking than it first appears.