Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: State of Global Development & EA (2024), published by DavidNash on April 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

A shallow overview of the EA & global development ecosystem.[1]

There isn't one large EA & GD ecosystem, it is mainly individuals considering their own path to impact, with minor coordination amongst people who are part of the wider network and closer coordination amongst groups in a couple of areas (effective giving/charity entrepreneurship).

Resources

GD & EA

newsletter

updates covering a variety of topics relevant to broad global development

GD & EA LinkedIn group - for anyone that has an interest in GD topics and can help people find each other who share that interest

EA Forum

Global Health & Development Topic/Wiki

For global development professionals ( including think tanks/government/for-profit orgs/academia/finance) there is an EA & GD Slack. Currently there are ~200 members - you can apply using this form

For GD professionals based in London there is also a WhatsApp group to help coordinate and arrange monthly meetups, message me for details[2]

Global Development Ecosystems

Effective Giving

57 organisations, including a few that evaluate impactful giving opportunities and others that only focus on fundraising

There is one full time organiser to help with info sharing and connections between these orgs

GWWC support incubation of early stage effective giving initiatives

Givewell raised ~ $600 million in 2022 (the latest date I could find figures for, and includes OP giving ~$350m[3])

Other effective giving orgs in 2022 raised ~$103 million (for most of those orgs this isn't specifically for global development, although I wouldn't be surprised if 50%+ was allocated to GD)

For 2023 the data is incomplete but so far ~$157 m was raised by non GiveWell orgs

Effective Charities

There are several charities recommended by evaluators, most of them founded before EA existed and usually have funding outside of EA

Malaria Consortium

,

Against Malaria Foundation

,

Helen Keller International

Charity Entrepreneurship helps found charities attempting to be good enough to get recommended status

They also help the alumni network of charities and incubatees with connections, events and ongoing support

Foreign Aid

$211 billion was spent on international aid in 2022 by member states of the Development Assistance Committee - a collection of 32 donor countries

There are debates over how much actually counts as aid, and it doesn't include aid from countries outside of DAC

Open Philanthropy spent $16m on global aid policy in 2022 and 2023. They are aiming to

Increase international aid budgets (and reduce cuts)

Increase funding to especially impactful programs

Spur cross-cutting improvements in existing programs

Sam Anschell recently wrote about his experiences working on OP's Global Aid Policy program

There are individuals who work in a variety of foreign aid departments who have an interest in EA ideas

Probably Good with a post looking at careers in aid policy & advocacy

Development Finance/Impact Investing

There are many multilateral & bilateral development banks, aiming to promote economic development, provide long term financing and stabilise the global financial system

It was hard to find out how much money was moved in development finance (and a lot of it is loans) but it is probably in the hundreds of billions

There are some EA interested people working in development finance but very rarely are they connected to each other or the wider EA & GD network

Similarly with impact investing, there are a few people but often not connected

Startups/Private Sector in LMICs

The most well known success story is Wave, a mobile service provider that allows unbanked people in Africa to access financial services. They estimated that the company saves people in Senegal over ...