Many charities are actually ineffective

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

Playpumps International is a charitable organisation that installs merry-go-rounds that pump water from deep underground into elevated water tanks. Images of happy, smiling children working together to help solve Africa’s water problem enabled the charity to raise millions of dollars from celebrities and governments around the world.

But what began as a well-intentioned effort quickly became a case study of why good intentions are not always enough.

The pumps have been criticised by WaterAid (the world’s largest water charity) for being too expensive, reliant on child labour, and prohibitively difficult to maintain. The Guardian calculated that a child would need to “play” non-stop for 27 hours every day to meet Playpump International’s stated target.

Millions of dollars were spent on the pumps, which cost $14,000 each. Sadly, the funds could have been used for other purposes such as simple hand pumps, which cost a fraction of the price and are easy to maintain by the communities that use them.

The real victims in this story are not aid donors, but thousands of children who were left without access to clean water.

We need to focus on effectiveness

The story of Playpumps International is indeed shocking, but by no means rare. Many charities that exist today have no proven impact, and some have even a negative impact. This is the first of four reasons why we as Christians need to focus on effectiveness:

1. Charities can be ineffective.

2. The difference in impact between charities is massive.

3. Cognitive biases lead us to make ineffective decisions.

4. Every person matters to God.

Charities Are Not Made Equal

It is tempting to think that while there are a few ineffective charities, the vast remainder of charities are roughly equal in terms of effectiveness. But evidence shows that the very best charities can have up to 10 - 100x more impact than others. Let’s consider for a moment two health charities working on the cause of blindness.

Guide Dogs is one of the UK’s favourite charities (according to YouGov). Their mission is to help people with sight loss by providing seeing-eye dogs; dogs that are trained to assist with various day-to-day tasks that can be challenging for people who are blind or partially sighted. A less well-known charity in the UK is Sightsavers, which works in some of the poorest parts of the world. Their work includes treating trachoma, an infection that if left untreated, slowly causes blindness. In many countries trachoma pushes people into the cycle of poverty, limiting access to health services, education and employment.

The cost of a guide dog, according to the Guide Dogs website, comes to about $65,000. Surgeries to treat trachoma costs about $20 per patient (Cook et al. 2006, p. 954). This means that for a similar cost to providing one guide dog in the UK, you could provide a considerable sight improvement to roughly 3000 people. Even if the cost of the surgery is ten times higher than researchers think it is, the tradeoff is still 1 guide dog versus 300 trachoma treatments.

The point here is not to vilify any charity; but rather, to point out the massive difference in impact between average charities and the best ones. This difference is especially well-documented in global health as shown in the chart below.

It is plausible to think such disparities exist not only in global health, but also between charities of other cause areas Christians care about (for instance, global poverty or missions) as well as between cause areas themselves. Donations made to the most effective charities can be 10 - 100x more impactful, on average. Christians who make effectiveness a focus point can have an outstanding impact for God.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

One reason we often lose sight of effectiveness is that we underestimate opportunities that help large amounts of people, due to something called “scope neglect.”

Scope neglect is a cognitive bias where people improperly value something once it grows several multiples in size, or becomes larger than we can easily visualise. The idea is summed up well in the quote: "the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."

In a famous example, researchers created three separate groups of students and asked each group how much they would pay to save 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 migrating birds from drowning in oil ponds. Despite the vast differences in size between these bird populations, the group answers were virtually identical: $80, $78, and $88.

Put another way, the students valued saving 20,000 birds less than saving 2,000 birds.

You might not care about birds. After all, Jesus does say we are worth more than many sparrows (Matt 10:31). So what about people?

Behavioral economists conducted similar tests but with humans as aid recipients. They too found that donors tended to give less to humanitarian relief efforts that help more people, even when it costs the same. We prefer to help individuals, whose stories we can more easily engage with. As one researcher put it:

“People care about individuals. We see it over and over again: There's a child who needs an operation, his parents can't afford to pay for this operation, and there's a story in the newspaper. An outpouring of money donations and support is often tremendous. We do care a lot about individuals. We don't scale that up, even when we're capable.”

Every Person Matters

It must be true that scope neglect is a bias of the human mind, not an aspect of God’s heart. After all, every person matters to God. We are reminded of the parable of the lost sheep where God is the shepherd who sets aside an entire flock to search out even a single lost sheep. God knows even the number of hairs on our heads. God loved us enough to take on our humanity and die on a cross for us.

Effectiveness matters not because our salvation rests on our own merit, but rather because every individual is of immeasurable worth to God.

We must therefore resist the temptation to only value people we can see, and instead consider how our resources can help the most people, in the greatest ways. This will often lead us to donate to global charities that help people we will personally never meet, or to pursue careers that solve problems we may never have felt passionate about.

In the next section, we tackle the criticism that using reason and evidence is too cold and calculating.

— Written by JD Bauman