This is the South Asia solutions
presentation. Recapping what we've done
so far in the course, we've looked at a
whole bunch of different solutions to
world problems. We've talked about
non-governmental organizations or NGOs,
international government organizations,
we've looked into fair trade,
microfinance, we've contrasted holistic
development with single solution
development, and in the next region
module we're going to talk a little bit about
disaster relief. In the Islamic empire we
did something that is really the
beginning of what I want to talk about
for this particular region module. We
looked at single solution versus
holistic development and then we talked
a little bit about how each of them
measures their effectiveness and what
they do. I made the argument back
then that single solution was a little
bit more akin to quantitative measures
while holistic was a little bit more
akin to qualitative measures and that
that, to some extent, that made it a little
bit easier to look at single solution
solutions. Because you know you're
able to look at the numbers a little bit
more easily than you are the qualitative
data. But now what I want to do is 
ask the question: How do we know which
organizations and which methods really
are the best? Not just in terms of how
these organizations report what they do.
That's actually a pretty difficult
question. This question really comes out
of a new movement that we're seeing more
and more of in the development world
called "effective altruism". "Effective
altruism" argues that we really need to
be asking tough questions about what our
money does, not just money that we
contribute to charitable organizations,
but also to government spending, as well.
Effective altruism often asks: Can
dollars spent translate directly into
lives saved and how can we save the most
lives as efficiently as possible so that
we're able to do the very most good?
Now there are a couple of ways to look
at this and the way that's most common
is to look at these issues of efficiency
and transparency, which we already did a
little bit in this course by looking at
Charity Navigator. You may remember this
website that ranks each of the
organizations that we've been talking
about, or at least many of the
organizations that we've been talking
about, and gives them a four star rating
or a three star rating. These ratings are
generally based on measures such as how
much of the money that is donated to an
organization goes directly to the
programs that it's doing versus how much
goes to administration.
Another thing that's often measured is
how much are executives paid in an
organization and then a third thing
that's often measured is how clear are
the accounting practices of that
organization. So we can really see,
transparently, what that organization is
doing. All these measures are really
important measures and help us to
understand at least some aspects of what
an organization does. Now there are some
critiques of it. For example, one size
doesn't fit all and it turns out that
some organizations get a lot of grant
money and they can turn that directly
into program; they don't have to raise
their own money in part because maybe
they're doing someone else's bidding and
so they might not be able to be as
innovative as an organization that's
raising its own money is. And executives,
it could be argued, can bring a lot to an
organization if you have a highly paid
executive. That person might be a really
great executive and they might be able
to really help that organization meet
its goals much better than someone who's
only poorly paid and might not be the
very best candidate for the job. So,
oftentimes, these sorts of measures of
efficiency and transparency are useful
but they don't tell everything and they
also often don't go very deep
That's where measuring effectiveness
comes in and again we briefly talked
about this when we looked at an
organization called GiveWell, which I'd
like you to look at a little bit after
you complete this. Measuring
effectiveness asks the questions that
are really sort of tough for an
organization: Does the program do exactly
what it's supposed to be doing? If it's
supposed to alleviate hunger,
are people less hungry? If it's
trying to reduce malaria, are there fewer
cases of malaria? And then it looks very,
very closely at how organizations are
measuring their outcomes and how
effective they are in doing what they're
doing. In other words, are they really
efficient and if I make a $1 donation to
one organization can it do more with
that dollar than what an other
organization might be able to do? Now
there have been critiques of this as
well that sometimes they're too
quantitative and they miss some of the
really big picture items, but it's a
really important conversation to have. Is
an organization effective and how are we
assessing that effectiveness? A few final
thoughts because this is, obviously,
something and it's going to take you a
little bit of time to think about and
dig into as well. Let's remember that
effectiveness probably shouldn't just be
measured with a sort of external thing
like how many lives are we saving or how
many bed nets are we putting up or how
much hunger are we stopping. Remember
that some organizations try to solve
root causes and that can, in many ways, be
much more effective than fixing symptoms.
A great example of this, actually, is in
HIV and AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa back
when HIV and AIDS was a much more
problematic plague than it is right now
(and it's still pretty bad in Sub-Saharan
Africa). There was a huge debate in the
development world about whether money
should be going into prevention or into
extending people's lives who already had
the disease. It was pretty popular to
argue to get anti-retroviral medicines to
people who have the disease to extend
their life and reduce their suffering.
But there were a number of people in the
development world who argued that if you
can prevent the transmission of the
disease it's actually much cheaper and
it saves more lives in the long run. So
that's a good argument of root causes
versus actually fixing the symptoms of
something. And then another thing I'd
like you to think a little bit about is
once you start really thinking about
effectiveness,
you can find yourself in a little bit of
a rabbit hole, as I've set up here in the
presentation. And what I mean by that is
if you start asking how many lives can I
save with $1 it's going to necessarily get
you thinking a little bit: What am I
doing with money that might not be
effective at all, that might be pretty
selfish, focused on me as opposed to
other people, and shouldn't I be spending
that money more effectively than I am?
And before you know it, you can find
yourself really questioning what you are
doing with your life and how much money
you should be spending on luxury goods
and things like that, and that's another
really important thing to explore. Spend
a little bit of time thinking about it.
