The truth is that there are a lot of people like you, us, with strange hobbies or talents or gifts and we try to hide it because we're afraid that it makes us seem weird or it will turn people off, but that's a mistake. What makes me unique has brought every person I love into my life. ~Ned, Pushing Daisies
For any random billionaires who want to buy back a portion of their soul by fixing (part of) the world, I would like to suggest starting a Research and Development Fund for Boring Shit.
- Agricultural statistics are terrible–everyone uses FAO data, everyone bitches about how the FAO data is wrong, but it’s the only data available. Ditto for pretty much all statistical data in countries that don’t have well-funded national statistics programs (and for many who do). Figure out how to fix this. It’s hard to solve problems if you can’t even measure them.
- Low cost, low maintenance rural/peri-urban electrification and water infrastructure. NOT “let’s invent a clever new thing.” There’s 1001 of those already. Make a fund that villages can apply to or something. Make it super easy to apply: “I want x number of solar panels and y metres of electrical cable.” Okay! Here’s $1000 (or whatever, but that’s the order of magnitude we’re talking about), go electrify your village! Don’t know what you need? Let’s put you in touch with someone who already did the thing, they can give you advice. Monitoring: buy a guy a motorbike, pay him to go fill out a checklist: “did they do the thing? how many houses have light bulbs now?” What if people just bribe the checklist guy? Pay him decently, make it cheaper to admit you fucked up than to bribe someone to lie for you, and you’ll get a lot less lying!
Do that for 5 years. Assess the hopefully thousands of projects you’ve funded. See what you learn.
- train nurses. train vet techs. train teachers. train extension workers. fund literacy programs. build roads. sure, the government should do it, but guess what? that doesn’t actually matter.
Think SMALL. Hire people who know the area they’re working in. Give them lots of flexibility and minimal paperwork. Fund a bunch of shit and see what works where–because no, whatever GiveWell et al. claim, we don’t know all that well, see my first point in re statistics. Care less about efficiency and more about giving people chances to try stuff out. Don’t just SAY you do this. Actually do it.
There’s lots* of donors who want to fund “innovative” “evidence-based” programs that claim they’re going to Fix The Whole World Sustainably through Empowerment Gender-Aware Climate-Smart Capacity-Building Self-Sustaining Development Goals Success Revolution. And that’s fine! We need those too.
(*relatively)
But let’s have some more organizations that will fund boring shit that’ll probably work, or at least not fuck up too badly.
