Flashlights and Giving
by Elizabeth Van Nostrand
This post is an excerpt from Elizabeth Van Nostrand’s piece “Seeing Like a State, Flashlights, and Giving this Year” which was published on Aceso Under Glass: Science, Altruism, and Video Games. The complete article explores how to determine effectiveness in philanthropy.
There is a fallacy called the streetlight fallacy; it refers to looking for your keys under the lamppost, where there is light, rather than in the dark alley where you lost your keys. The altruism equivalent is doing things that are easy to measure, instead of things with the greatest impact. This is not categorically wrong; when it’s easy to do harm, it is correct to stay in areas where you’ll at least know what happened. But staying in the streetlight forever means leaving billions of people to suffer. To advance, we need flashlights.
I know of one organization that I am confident is a capacity-building flashlight: Tostan. Tostan provides a three year alternative educational program to rural villages in West Africa. The first 8 months are almost entirely about helping people articulate their dreams. What do they want for their children? For their community? The program includes health information, and then two years teaching participants the skills they need to run a business (literacy, numeracy, cell phone usage, etc), while helping them think through what is in line with their values.
Until recently Tostan had very little formal data collection. So why am I so confident they’re doing good work? Well, for one, the Gates Foundation gave them a grant to measure the work and initial results are very promising, but before that there were other signs.
First, villages ask Tostan to come to them. There is a waitlist. Villages do receive seed money to start a business in their second year, but 6–9 hours of class per week and the cost of hosting their facilitator is kind of a long game.
Second, Tostan has had a few very large successes in areas with almost no competitors. In particular; female circumcision. Tostan was not founded to address this issue, especially given the history of western intervention in the subject is… poor. Historic interventions have been toxic and eroded relationships between beneficiaries and the NGOS trying to help them. It makes sense that people do not like being told that their cherished cultural tradition, which is necessary for their daughters to be accepted by the community and get good things in their life, is “mutilating” them, and western NGOs have a hard time discussing genital cutting as anything else. But Tostan taught health, including things that touched on culture. E.g. “If your baby’s head looks like this she is dehydrated and needs water with sugar and salt. Even if they have diarrhea, I know it seems weird to pump water into a baby that can’t keep it in, but this is what works. Witch doctors are very good at what they do, but please save them for witch doctor problems.”
And one day, someone in a Tostan class asked about genital cutting.
One of Tostan’s innovations is using the neutral term “female genital cutting”, as opposed to circumcision, which many people find to be minimizing, or mutilation, which others find inflammatory.
It may seem obvious that cutting off a girl’s labia or clitoris with an unsterilized blade, and (depending on the culture) sewing them shut is going to have negative health consequences. But if everyone in your village does it, and your daughter’s social standing depends on it, those connections may not be clear. For example, Industrial Europeans accepted childbed fever as just a thing that happened despite having much more available counter-evidence.* So when Tostan answered their questions honestly- that FGC could lead to death or permanent pain at the time, and greatly increases the chances of further damage during childbirth- it was news.
The mothers who cut their daughters were not bad people. If you didn’t know the costs, cutting was a loving decision. But once these women knew, they couldn’t keep doing it, and they organized a press conference to say so. To be clear, this was aided by Tostan but driven by the women themselves.
When the first village held a press conference to announce their decision to end FGC it went … poorly. A village deciding not to cut was better than a single mother deciding not to cut, but it wasn’t enough. Intermarriage between villages was common and the village as a whole suffered reprisal. In despair Tostan’s founder, Molly Melching, talked to Demba Diawara, a respected imam. He explained the cultural issues to her, and that the only way to end cutting was for many villages to end it at the same time. So Tostan began helping women to organize mass refusals, and it worked. So far almost 8000 villages in West Africa have declared an end to genital cutting, of which ~2000 come from villages that directly participated in Tostan classes (77% of villages that practice cutting that took part in Tostan), and ~6000 are villages adopted by the first set.
Coincidentally, at the same time Tostan founder Molly Melching was testing this, Gerry Mackie, a graduate student, was researching foot-binding in China and discovered it ended the exact same way; coordinated mass pledges to stop.
This is not conclusive. Maybe it’s luck that Melching’s method consistently ended female genital cutting where everyone else had failed, in a method that subsequently received historical validation. But I believe in following lucky generals.
FGC is not the only issue Tostan believes it improves. It believes it facilitates systemic change across the board, leading to better treatment of children, more independence for women, cleaner villages, and more economic prosperity. But it doesn’t do everything in every village, because each village’s needs are different, and because what they provide is responsive to what the community asks for. So now you’re measuring 100 different axes, some of which take a long time to generate statistically significant data on (e.g. child marriage) some of which are intrinsically difficult to measure (women’s independence), and you can’t say ahead of time which axes you expect to change in a particular sample. This is hard to measure, and not because Tostan is bad at measuring.
That’s not to say they aren’t trying. Thanks to a grant from the Gates Foundation, Tostan has begun before and after surveys to measure its effect. In addition to the difficulties I mentioned above, it faces technical challenges, language issues, and the difficulty of getting honest answers about sensitive questions.
I believe Tostan is inventing flashlights so we can hunt for our keys in the woods. It is hard, and it is harder to prove its effectiveness. But ultimately it leads to the best outcomes for the world.
I am urging people to donate to Tostan for several reasons:
- To support a program that is object level doing a lot of good
- To support the development of flashlight technology that will help others do more good.
- To demonstrate to the warmest, fuzziest, most culturally respecting of charities that incorporating hard data will get them more support, not less.
My personal gift, combined with my company’s match, totals $39,500. I am giving this outright, rather than offering it as a match or incentive, because I believe in Tostan that strongly. I hope that you will join me.
*Postpartum infections were common in births attended by a physician because washing your hands between an autopsy and a birth was considered peasant superstition. Midwives, who followed the superstition, had a lower death rate. This discovery languished in part because the doctor who discovered it was an asshole and no one wanted to listen to him, and that’s why I don’t allow myself to dismiss ideas from people just because I don’t like them.
