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.