A long time ago, I taught in India, in a village in Tamil Nadu. It had just one road on which were the shop, the temple, the land-owner's big house, and the tree where the erratic buses stopped. All the other tracks were dirt, leading to people's houses and the wells and out into the fields. The school in which I taught, the only one in the village, had about 40 children on the register aged between about three and about eleven (they were often unclear about their ages). Each morning, some 20 or 30 pupils would arrive: it was pretty rare to have a full house. I wondered why they came so sporadically. There were many children in the village who didn't come to school at all. Some clearly wanted to come: they would stand at the school windows and watch, or even drop in on lessons, more frequently if the lesson was outside under a tree than if we were in the classroom, I noticed. Sometimes I'd see the children out in the fields during school time - maybe working, maybe just playing - or going to the well, or doing errands, or just sitting. I wondered why they didn't come.
Other people have wondered this too. Unlike me, they've done something about it: gone to the trouble of identifying why children skip school in these villages, and researching what happens if those reasons are addressed. Poor transport to and from school is one factor. Another problem is the cost of a school uniform - even in dusty Tamil Nadu it's just too weird for a child to be the only one in the classroom wearing something different. A third is that parents take children out of school, perhaps to deal with the harvest or care for younger siblings. All of these factors were visible from my classroom window. But a fourth factor I hadn't seen. In villages like mine, many children have intestinal worms - amazingly, one in four people globally has some form of worms - which cause anything from malaise and lethargy to severe pain, and which prevent children from doing anything much, including coming to school.
Charities run programmes to solve each of these four problems. They all do some good.
But what a variation in how much good they do! One type of programme addresses the issue of parents keeping children out of school, by giving them a payment when the children show up at school. These `conditional cash transfer' programmes cost about $1000 to keep a child in school for a whole year (including all the management costs). Another programme distributes school uniforms. There, $1,000 achieves rather more - and not just a little bit more. It achieves ten times as much: for the same amount of money, school uniforms can get ten children into school for an additional year. One child or ten: it's no contest. And even that isn't half the story. Dealing with the worms isn't `just' ten times as good. Deworming (as it's charmingly called) can keep a child in school for a year for just $40 . It's 25 times better. (In fact, even that understates it: some deworming programmes add a year of education for just $4. You read that correctly. They achieve 250 times as much. For the sake of argument, let's be conservative and call it `just' 25.)
To put that another way, if you put $1,000 into a conditional cash transfer programme, you'll do some good. But you could have done 25 times that much good - there's a whole gaggle of children out in the fields who could have been in school. That is, every time a donor puts $1000 into the wrong programme, fully 24 children needlessly miss out.
Though deworming is an extreme example, this pattern repeats right across the charity world: some charities are better than others. It sounds almost heretical to say it because we tend to think that all charities are good. But we also think that teaching is a good thing, and so is providing medical care, and yet we're familiar with the notion that some teachers are better than others and some doctors are better than others. The seeds which scattered on stony ground produce nothing, would feed a family if planted in fertile soil.
Our donations to charity could be getting more children into school, eradicating diseases faster, better empowering communities, adding more to our cultural life and so on. `Don't settle for average' cries the slogan of GiveWell, an organisation of independent charity analysts. Wouldn't you rather that your donations achieved a lot rather than just a little?
This book is about how to do that. Hence it is dedicated to those 24 children who missed out on school because donors made the wrong call, and who are totemic of anyone or anything that has missed out because of poor decisions by donors.
