Case Study 1: How do philanthropists choose the issue they care about most?
In case you’re curious about the philanthropy action, are they doing a good job or just doing good to make their reputation shiny?
I find it interesting when all the people fight for education and health at all costs. Education and health are indeed vital and fundamental things for a country’s development. However, I’m still curious about their framework before donating their money. A massive amount of money will be donated to a specific issue, and I believe they must use a rigid process, mathematical hypothesis, and endless meetings to decide.
However, after reading Vox’s article lately, I assume that a vast amount of money must go to waste because of a lack of a selection process. What? I think my assumption is quite frankly right now. The selection cause? Really? Why bother to make a selection cause? It’s just someone’s pure heart to help other people, right?
Let’s talk about selection causes.
Since 2012, Open Philanthropy has learned about philanthropy’s track record by catching up with donors, leaders, and staff. Philanthropists need to plan for a multi-layer commitment to causes. A cause is a particular problem or opportunity to improve lives and develop expertise and networks to make good decisions.
There are three main points to contemplate in pursuing the goal that we want to focus on more, namely:
Importance
Importance means how many individuals are affected by this issue and how deeply? How far can this breakthrough accomplish? However, it’s hard to conclude which is the most critical issue. Importance comparison can be tricky and subjective. Say that you want to help the education issue, should you fund to give free books to kids around your neighborhood or to charities for certain projects?
This is where thinking about neglectedness and tractability can help.
Neglectedness
This is where some causes receive less attention from others, particularly major philanthropists. Are there important causes to make a difference that receive little support? While investigating the cause, we have to consider multiple activities that might make a difference.
Say that you’re concerned about mass immunization targeting common diseases like polio and measles, which are super effective in preventing certain diseases and saving lives. Big philanthropists donate a lot of money, like UNICEF, WHO, GAVI Alliance, and Gates. So, it makes so for some funders to look at that situation and think, ”They have this covered, and why don’t I try something else?”
Tractability
We look for clear ways so that funders can contribute to the progress. It can be challenging to anticipate what opportunities will arise and how long they will last. Also, there are some issues where we see relatively broad and robust dynamics that make progress particularly likely or unlikely.
In this framework, it’s worth to break down a little bit of what we’re doing here. Funders need to know ways to get the intervention adopted. For example, (I take this from Vox’s article) If you, for some reason, supported reviving alcohol prohibition in America, there’s basically no way a temperance movement is going to succeed in the 21st century. Rather than wasting billions in an effort to revive the 18th Amendment, you should direct it somewhere it has better odds of effecting change.
You also need to do shallow investigations, like what is the problem or opportunity? And how important is it? What could be done to address it? Who else is working on it? With this amount of research, the philanthropist or even you, who want to do charity, can have the best baseline and increase the opportunity to improve lives.
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Melva Bintang.