Charities we’d like to see
blog.givewell.org
blog.givewell.org
They use an evidence-backed model called conditional cash transfers. They give money to disadvantaged pregnant women when they achieve health goals that increase the probability of their child's survival (example: activities to reduce HIV transmission from mothers to babies).
The whole organization is a mobile-first organization using biometrics for verification (because technology is the best way to cut across corruption) and they work on many interesting operational challenges. The organization could really use the help of more engineers, especially Android app developers, to tackle some of these challenges.
If anyone is interested, please respond to this comment or ping me.
Best of luck to New Incentives.
(P.S. if you want to recruit in this thread, I'd specify if it's paid or volunteer and whether it's on-site or remote. Or anything else they have in Who's Hiring? threads.)
Online applications are a huge success, corruption-wise. So tech does really have something going on in a very meaningful amount of cases.
For example, without technology we'd be facing the same issue as the Nigerian government (the country we work in): ghost beneficiaries. By taking advantage of currently available biometric solutions, we reduce this and increase the likelihood that our money goes to real beneficiaries. We are wary of adopting technology unless it is absolutely necessary. Another way we use technology is to collect data in the field. We are working in remote, rural areas with high levels of rainfall so we use mobile apps to collect data. This helps reduce the amount of data compromised and also provides an additional layer of verification: by seeing timestamps and knowing exactly who edits what and when. This helps us maintain higher levels of accountability and identify early warning signs of potential fraud.
There are benefits besides poverty-reduction. For example, this study by the World Bank (http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServ...) concludes that CCTs reduce child labout.
It's important to note that GiveWell is not necessarily pushing in this direction yet. Instead, they are placing bets that they potentially think could have a huge payoff if done right.
CCTs can be very effective or completely ineffective. This is because the second "C" matters a lot. What the program conditions makes all the difference. If the program is focusing on incentivizing interventions that are not cost-effective, the CCT won't be cost-effective because the underlying focus is too costly. Another aspect is what the long-term effects of the program are when the incentive ends. In our case, we are focusing on HIV transmission from mothers to infants and neonatal death. Our temporary incentives have a long-lasting effect by saving a child from getting HIV or a newborn from dying. However, if you were to have a CCT for something that is not life or death and would be needed throughout one's lifetime, the cost would potentially be too high.
Some of the most successful CCTs are for immunizations. This is because immunizations are a proven cost-effective health intervention in the first place. So adding the small CCT to increase coverage maintains cost-effectiveness while achieving benefits from having a greater percent of the population that is immunized.
There's a void in the NGO and commercial space between people who do good stuff, and people who can provide security and operate in denied areas. Some orgs like MSF can operate in semi-permissive environments, but not as well as states can. There are a lot of downsides to state involvement in this kind of thing -- unless you're neutral, it's really hard to get involved in a lot of conflicts, and states are pretty horrible at providing IT services in general, and have all kinds of incentives to scale too big/inefficiently.
It'd be nice to have a non military option for that kind of operational support. The place where I work now can do some of that, but it's hard to convince donors to invest in those sort of "someday we'll need this" resource.
There is a startup non-profit called Uplift Aeronautics[1] that was talking about doing something like that. It was going to be a UAV 'train' that dropped supplies into Syria using randomized paths so to make it hard to shoot down.
Roshan's founder, Karim Khoja, was basically sent to build a telecom network in Afghanistan by his religious leader, the Aga Khan. The Aga Khan heads the Ismaili religion, which is a small (~25m) sect of Shia Muslims. He oversees the Aga Khan Development Network [1] which has both a non-profit and a for-profit arm that work together to build up developing economies. I know they're also pretty heavily involved in humanitarian efforts in Syria at the moment.
Roshan was well-managed and very successful. It employed a large number of awesome Afghans, and contributed a lot to an economy that had nothing else going for it besides war, opium, and rugs.
Just one example of an organization that is doing good things out there, especially in the war-torn middle east. Things might change for the worse now that the US/Europe is pulling out of Afghanistan and the Taliban/ISIS are coming back to power. At the end of the day it was the stability brought by the armed forces that allowed expats and investments to flow into the country.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_Khan_Fund_for_Economic_Dev...
(Note that there are two films with the same name launched around the same time. This is the one by Michael Miller, not the one by Gary Null.)
[1] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/michael_matheso.htm...