How Effective Altruism Is Shaping Our Responses to COVID-19

Coronavirus has impacted every country in the world. However, there is no doubt that the health and economic consequences of COVID-19 disproportionately affect the most vulnerable populations. Can an effective altruism approach (investing resources and effort to maximize the amount of good that can be achieved) improve our global response to COVID-19? I believe it can.

Building Tools to do the Most Amount of Good

Helpful Engineering is one of the most exciting examples of effective altruism in action. Charles He, a management and machine learning freelancer from British Columbia, created a 13,000-user Slack group and quickly mobilized it to fight the coronavirus pandemic. How did he do it? He hopped on sites like Hacker News and Reddit to recruit engineers to join the fight against the pandemic.

Charles He named the loosely organized group “Helpful Engineering.” Thousands of volunteers work on dozens of projects, including building ventilators and manufacturing protective face shields, masks, hand sanitizer, and personal protective equipment. Charles He says they are focusing on the things that have the most value…that save lives.

Guided by his work in effective altruism, Charles He focused on building the tools that are the easiest to create and will do the most amount of good. Engineers are mostly from the US, but also Brazil, Poland, India, and Portugal. The group has expanded to include lawyers, students, entrepreneurs, and even some mayors.

Effective Altruism Organizations Quickly Pivoted to Fight COVID-19

GiveDirectly’ s cash transfer program has emerged as a critical tool in the COVID-19 response in Sub-Saharan Africa. You may remember this NGO from a previous blog article. According to Rachel Waddell, Partnerships Director at GiveDirectly,

“Without support, households will inevitably be forced to engage in negative coping strategies like taking on debt, selling assets for survival, and the impacts of this will last far beyond the COVID response measures themselves.”

GiveDirectly was able to immediately hit the ground because it already had an infrastructure in place that is impervious to pandemic-related disruptions. Their digital cash program is cost-effective and gets around COVID quarantines, closures, and social distancing. The money arrives quickly and safely. More importantly, the mobile money-based model means that 75–90% of your contribution goes directly to the recipient.

Through the lens of effective altruism, we see that the best response to COVID-19 in Sub-Saharan Africa is to support those who have lost their employment. Our hearts may focus on the most impoverished, but we see that it’s more important to protect those previously contributing to thriving local markets. If local economies collapse, the long-term result will outlast the pandemic.

Doing the Most Amount of Good: Flour Mills and Refugee Camps

Effective altruism pushes us to think strategically, giving birth to innovative COVID-19 response programs that “do the most good.” I’ll finish with two more examples. Oxfam organized WhatsApp groups to broadcast critical information about healthcare and hygiene in refugee camps, like Za’atari in Jordan, where the country is in total lockdown. The app is also facilitating cash transfers to refugees in Jordan and Yemen. NGO Sanku is distributing protective gear, medicated soap, and hand sanitizer to flour mills across Tanzania. Keeping flour mill workers safe and healthy means that a primary source of the country’s economy can survive the pandemic.