<aside> 🔍 Around 700 million people still live in poverty, mostly in low-income countries. Efforts to help them - by policy reform, cash transfers, or provision of health services - can be incredibly effective.

Alongside investigating this issue, we also discuss how much more effective some interventions are than others, and we introduce a simple tool for estimating important figures.

Key concepts from this session include:

• Differences in impact: It appears that some of our options to help do many times more good than others. People generally don’t appreciate this, and so miss out on significant opportunities to help.

Fermi estimates:

When you’re trying to make a decision, it can be useful to make a rough calculation for which option is best. Even if there’s a lot of uncertainty, this can give you a rough answer, and can tell you which things are most important to estimate next.

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Required Materials

Differences in impact:

• Comparing charities: How big is the difference? (5 mins.)
• The moral imperative towards cost-effectiveness (10 mins.)

Fermi estimation

• A brief explanation of Fermi estimation (1 min.)
• An example Fermi estimate (1 min.)

Background data on global health and poverty:

• Global economic inequality (Our World in Data, 15 mins.)
• Global health (Our World in Data, 20 mins.)

“Classic” EA strategies for addressing global poverty:

• GiveWell’s “Giving 101” guide (click through to “next” at the bottom of each page, about 15 mins., but feel free to explore the rest of the site).
• Health in poor countries problem profile (10 mins.)

Some newer EA strategies for improving the wellbeing of humans living in poverty:

• South Asian Air Quality Cause Investigation (18 mins.)
• Introducing the Lead Exposure Elimination Project (7 mins.)
• Note that these are just two examples of interventions that EAs have been working on - there are many more in the further reading section.

Exercise (20 mins.)

Part A (20 mins.)