May 2024 marked the last month of the Center for Effective Aid Policy. This post serves as the public post-mortem. I have strived for it to be interesting to the average forum reader, who may not know much about the cause area.

For professionals in development, we have a few internal private write ups which we may be more interesting, such as an overview of development asks we tried[1], their strengths and weaknesses, and our experience advocating for them.

Our mission

Our mission was to improve the cost-effectiveness of development assistance through policy advocacy. Governments spend billions on projects to help the world's poorest, few of them cost-effective.

For example, one could propose the use of cash-benchmarking to the ministry or push through a political motion to increase the proportion of spending going to the Least Developed Countries.

If one could make even a small part of this very [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) Our mission

(01:14) How far did we get?

(01:18) The first months

(02:13) Things pick up

(03:33) The decision to shut down

(04:47) Why changing aid is difficult

(04:51) Development is a competitive market

(06:17) Political champions are few and far between

(07:43) Decreasing budgets limit maneuverability

(08:38) Was our execution sufficient?

(09:47) Insufficient founder-fit

(09:51) We lacked development experience

(10:49) We came to struggle with morale

(12:19) Should others try this intervention?

(15:36) Thank you to everyone who helped

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 2nd, 2024

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/emBSDADvCnSwtL2kS/center-for-effective-aid-policy-has-shut-down

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Children of the sun

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