EA - Introducing the Center for Effective Aid Policy (CEAP) by MathiasKB

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Introducing the Center for Effective Aid Policy (CEAP), published by MathiasKB on December 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We are incredibly excited to announce the launch of the Center for Effective Aid Policy (CEAP), a new non-profit incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship. Our mission is to improve the effectiveness of development aid. We will do so through policy advocacy to governments and INGOs.If you are unfamiliar with development aid and want to learn more, we wrote an introduction to the field which was posted to the forum last week. In short:Development aid represents one fourth of all charitable giving worldwide and is not known for its immaculate efficiency and clandestine operations. The cost-effectiveness of many aid projects can be vastly improved and we believe there are many opportunities to do so.In this post we will go over:Our near term plans.Speculative plans for the long term.How you can help!We additionally hope sharing our tentative plans can be a step towards greater organizational transparency in the effective altruism community. Some, both inside and outside this community, will disagree that our organization is a good use of resources. Our funding would most likely have gone to highly effective charities counterfactually.Being held accountable and scrutinized for our decisions, might hurt us in the short run but benefits everyone in the long run.Many parliaments are surrounded by ‘think-tanks’ who seek to influence policy in directions that just so happen to benefit the industries which are funding them. Decision makers should be free to evaluate our organization’s priorities and decide for themselves if they agree.Interventions we are excited aboutWe are entering a well-established field and stand on the shoulders of giants.There are many organizations with decades of experience doing great work to improve aid effectiveness - from research institutes doing academic research, to organizations solely focused on advocacy.Our work builds upon the collective research of thousands of academics, practitioners, and policy makers who have worked tirelessly for decades to improve the quality of aid.As a new organization we have the ability to move fast and break things. Taking risks on one's own behalf is all well and good, but mistakes we make might hurt the efforts of other organizations advocating for cost-effective aid spending.When we set out to prioritize between the many possible interventions, we looked for aid policies that experts in development and policymakers alike were excited about when interviewed.We have reached three of interventions that we think look especially promising:Interventions we want to address in our first year:Advocacy for cash-benchmarking of aid projectsCash-benchmarking advocacy was the intervention with the best reception among policymakers and academics we interviewed. Despite this, there is very little information available on cash-benchmarking. It doesn’t even have a wikipedia page! Google’s top result for cash-benchmarking is a one page report by USAID, describing a recent successful experiment they did.The discrepancy between the possible impact of improved benchmarking, the excitement of decision-makers, and lack of high quality public material is larger than for any other improvement to aid we reviewed. To change this state of affairs we are producing a comprehensive report, which can serve as a safe point of referral for policymakers and advocates.Advocacy to affect aid cutsA recent trend in western countries is for governments to cut aid spending. In 2020, the UK government made the decision to cut its aid spending from 0.7 to 0.5% of GNI. In 2022 the newly elected Swedish government cut future spending from 1% to 0.7%.Governments are also classifying previously non-aid bud...