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: Our Recommended Charity Ideas for February 2025, published by CE on August 7, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Applications are now open for AIM's Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program in 2025, with the next round taking place in February 2025. This program provides two months of intensive training in starting a non-profit, as well as co-founder matching, seed funding access, and recommended charity ideas.
This article provides an overview of our latest recommended charity ideas, which will be available to participants in the February 2025 cohort. We will publish full research reports for each recommended idea in the coming weeks.
Recommended Charity Ideas: One Paragraph Summary
Cage-Free Farming in the Middle East
We want to see a new organization implement the most successful and well-tested intervention of the animal movement - cage-free corporate campaigns - in a new, neglected region such as the Middle East, which farms
over 300 million hens every year. Cage-free campaigns are the backbone of the existing animal advocacy movement, with great progress being made on the global level, as we have seen
2,625 cage-free commitments made so far. 1,157 of these corporate pledges are now fully implemented across Europe, the UK, and the US, impacting
220 million hens. However, despite this global progress, there are still many countries without existing organizations or ongoing campaigns where layer hens are still suffering in the extreme confinement of battery or furnished cages. We can change that. We have already seen progress being made in the region by Kafessiz Türkiye in Türkiye.
We think focusing on the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt could be particularly promising for a new organization as there are currently no existing organizations working here.
Reducing Keel Bone Fractures
Keel bone fractures (KBF) are the
most important welfare concern in cage-free laying hens. They are caused by their unnaturally high egg-laying demand, lack of space to exercise, and freedom from cages, creating more opportunities for collisions and injuries on farms without appropriate stockmanship and management. We want to see a new organization work in countries that have made the most cage-free progress - particularly Germany, the UK, and the US - to help reduce the prevalence of KBF.
We are most excited about this being done through work with certifiers to set targets for KBF prevalence on their farms. For example,
Global Animal Partnership Steps 5 and 5+ require KBF prevalence to be at or below 25% on these farms. We think this new organization should first work with certifiers but then consider a pivot to focus on corporate campaigns (or policy) in the medium-to-long term, as these campaigns are more scalable and generally have a stronger evidence base than those with certifiers.
East Asian Fish Welfare
We continue to recommend a new organization working on fish welfare in neglected countries. We first recommended this idea in October 2022. Since then, we have updated the location and species considerations to make them more open (moving from focusing specifically on milkfish in the Philippines to including other species, such as tilapia, in other countries such as Indonesia and Taiwan). The scale of fish suffering is huge. A staggering
78 to 171 billion individual fish are slaughtered each year, and we still do not yet have an obvious, tested, and scalable ask and approach to improving fish welfare. This is particularly concerning in informal economies where we cannot borrow tactics from previously successful campaigns of the animal movement, such as cage-free corporate campaigning. Informal economies are very common in Asia, where roughly
90% of the global tonnage of farmed fish is produced. We think a new organization working to try and answer these diffic...
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